International Relations in a Relational Universe 2019946469, 9780198850885
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International Relations in a Relational Universe
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International Relations in a Relational Universe MILJA KURKI
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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Milja Kurki 2020 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2020 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2019946469 ISBN 978–0–19–885088–5 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198850885.001.0001 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
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Preface and Acknowledgements Co-existence challenges are intense and complex on this planet. Human communities are faced not only with conflict and inequality but also with progressively worsening environmental challenges and changing patterns of interconnection with other human communities and with non-human life and technology. In this sobering context, and as we observe the increasing disaffection with the conceptual tools of the discipline of International Relations (IR)—the academic discipline once envisioned to help resolve the gravest international and global political problems—this book seeks to reorient the academic study of international and global social problems. It seeks to do so by ‘loosening’ the underlying conceptual systems we have worked with in the field of IR, and the social sciences more widely, so as to allow us to see, sense, and reorient to our co-existence challenges on this planet in new ways. ‘Thinking together’ with relational cosmologists, I argue that we live in a processual universe of relations, a universe without ‘things’, ‘backgrounds’, ‘laws’, or ‘God’s eye’ points of view, and also a universe without special humans ‘ruling’ the planet. This relational universe can be a little unsettling for our vocabularies and ethical and political commitments—it certainly has been on mine—but it is also, I argue, a fruitful place from which to re-relate to the world facing a series of ecological and political challenges. Our conceptions of democracy, our understandings of the ‘international’, ‘global’, and ‘planetary’, and our response-abilities to others, ‘human’ and ‘non-human’, are shifted in this relational universe. In this book I try and explicate why a relational reorientation to the subject matter(s) of IR is possible and productive. I also develop some new conceptual tools to rethink the kind of conversations we can develop with the sciences—‘natural’ and ‘social’—as we think our way towards the ‘second century’ of IR. I hope that this endeavor opens up some new ways of thinking and relating. And I hope it generates a wider sense of why and how thinking about IR—and thinking about it anew—matters. For being able to complete the project (for now), I want to thank, first, the Department of International Politics at Aberystwyth University. I am privileged to work in this special department. The many conversations with my colleagues here are reflected in the book. I want to especially thank Hidemi Suganami, Jenny Edkins, Andrew Davenport, Richard Beardsworth, Ken Booth, Andrew Linklater, and Patrick Jackson, who have dedicated a great deal of time to discuss and comment on the ideas at various stages. This book also arises out of two sabbatical
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periods facilitated by Aberystwyth University. I am deeply grateful for the time and the belief invested in this somewhat unusual book project. I am also thankful for the many insightful and challenging comments offered by colleagues at the following universities in particular: University of Sheffield, the London School of Economics, University of Glasgow, and Universidad Javeriana. Thank you also to other commentators at various conferences, events, and discussions over the last five years. In particular I want to thank Hilkka SummaPollitt and Christopher Pollitt whose comments were, as always, tremendously provocative: I very much wish Christopher had been able to stay with us for long enough to comment on the final version. Finally, I also want to thank the lively and challenging kin of critters that I am privileged to cohabit a forest with in mid-Wales, and Peter who despite his many disagreements with my explorations in cross-disciplinary science, continues to encourage, provoke, and inspire new and more relational ways of thinking and being with humans, animals, and technology. I would like to dedicate this book to Professor Dave Barnes, a roboticist, a space explorer, a friend, and an inspiration to so many here in Aberystwyth and beyond. Milja Kurki Aberystwyth April 2019
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List of Figures 1. Things in network ‘relations’ á la ‘relational’ liberalism; we trace connections and inter-actions of actors, conceived as ‘nodes’
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2. Things making up social structure, a different ‘kind of a thing’
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3. My own imaging of relations of agential causation and social structural causation (redrawn from Kurki, 2008)
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Introduction What happens when human exceptionalism and bounded individualism, those old saws of Western philosophy and political economics, become unthinkable in the best sciences, whether natural or social? Seriously unthinkable: not available to think with. (Haraway, 2016: 30) If . . . cosmological developments are central to the politics of the future, then the articulation of new cosmologies is an important political task. As such, social scientists may have a duty not just to be critical of their own cosmological views, but to participate in the construction of new cosmologies. . . . [T]he work of social scientists today should include the creative recombination of ideas from a variety of discourses to articulate and defend new purposes. (Allan, 2018: 284) For a hundred years or so the study of International Relations (IR) has tried to provide answers to some of the gravest concerns of humanity. Why do human communities fight? Why and when do they cooperate? How do they prevent nuclear disaster from annihilating human life? How do we tackle uncontrolled climate change in a world of competing interests and ideas? IR has studied the manifold human coordination problems that put individual and collective existence in peril. And IR addresses questions that stand at the heart of our everyday lives: the history of international relations is embedded in the constitution of our genes and in our moral commitments to individuals and communities around us. So foundationally is life on this planet structured by the concepts which motivate the study of ‘International Relations’—sovereignty, states, self-interest—that, as Ken Booth poignantly puts it, ‘even if you are not interested in International Relations, International Relations is interested in you’ (Booth, 2014: 2). Yet, despite the importance of the study of IR, the ‘discipline’ has often been deemed to have ‘failed’, even—and perhaps especially—by IR scholars themselves. The study of IR has not generated a unified or consistent framework for understanding the world but rather a plurality of different theories, nor has it solved the many substantive problems of world politics (Buzan and Little, 2001; Sylvester 2007; 2013; Dunne, Kurki, and Smith 2016; Wight, Hansen, and Dunne, 2013; Rosenberg, 2016; Erskine and Booth, 2016; Cudworth and Hobden, 2017). And
International Relations in a Relational Universe. Milja Kurki, Oxford University Press (2020). © Milja Kurki. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198850885.001.0001
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while the discipline has from the start adopted a range of cross-disciplinary approaches to the international and the global—drawing from sociology, economics, history, anthropology, literature, and the arts—these interdisciplinary ventures have not unlocked the difficult coordination problems that the co-existence of multiple states/communities in the international creates. Perhaps as a result, the field itself has not influenced the other social sciences as much as it has been influenced by them (Rosenberg, 2016). As if the persistent doubts about IR’s constitution, role and functions were not enough, in recent years a new type of critic has emerged onto the scene. These critics of IR have pointed to the increasing irrelevance and impotence of IR in addressing the most severe ecological and environmental challenges we face (Burke et al., 2016; Cudworth and Hobden, 2011; 2013a; 2017; Mitchell, 2017; Grove, 2019; Dalby, 2014). As Cudworth and Hobden (2017: 1) put it, bluntly: Not only has the discipline overlooked the changing geopolitical situation, it has also failed to address a mounting economic and political crisis at a global level, and the escalating evidence that life on the planet is facing a system-wide catastrophe.
These critics pointedly argue that IR is ‘constitutionally’ unable to address the most important and pressing challenges we face on the planet. As Burke et al. (2016: 501) in their important ‘planet politics manifesto’, point out: ‘International Relations, as both a system of knowledge and institutional practice, is undone by the reality of the planet’. Unable to move beyond state-centric assumptions, unable to tackle or even see the vast inequalities between humans, and blind to the ecological crises, the field continues to be obsessed with the survival of states rather than the very real prospect of extinction of life as such on the planet (Mitchell, 2017). Even as the field is celebrating its (contested) centenary in 2019, the verdict is sobering: ‘By whatever measure one chooses to use we are moving in the wrong direction’ (Cudworth and Hobden, 2017: 2). If IR is indeed failing, what are we (as scholars of ‘IR’) to do? My suggestion is that we should follow Donna Haraway’s (2016: 36) call for us to ‘think!’ We should think—more and hard—on how we ‘think thoughts’ for, as she poignantly argues, it matters what thoughts think thoughts. In so doing we might recognize that some thoughts are now increasingly unthinkable, as her opening lines to this chapter suggest, and in need of serious rethinking. This book is an attempt, at a time of difficult challenges on the planet and in IR theory, to put forward some new ways to ‘think thoughts’ in, and around, IR. I seek to develop, in conversation with other fellow travellers, something of a new vocabulary for, or a reorientation to, the subject matter(s)¹ of IR. Yet, these ¹ For they are multiple.
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thoughts on how we might think thoughts anew is not offered as a new ‘paradigm’ as much as it is offered as a way of ‘loosening’ our existing conceptual commitments to allow for some novel reorientations and ethical and political commitments to emerge. As the reader might suspect from the title, this orientation is not developed from within IR, and it does not respect its ‘classical’ boundaries or paradigms. Rather I come to IR anew from a conversation across scientific and disciplinary boundaries. I engage a conversation here with those ‘natural scientists’ (something of a misnomer, as we will see) who have been interested in thinking through how we should orient to the world around us given the insights that we have gained in the physical sciences, in particular in cosmological science, during the last hundred years. I focus specifically on following up a conversation with relational cosmology, a strand of cosmological science which highlights the discovery (conceptual as much as empirical) of the ‘relational’ nature of the universe. By introducing relational cosmology to the study of international relations and politics, and by developing relational cosmology further in conversation with critical and relational theories of various hues, I seek to show that we can think without objects and things, without backgrounds and without laws. I also try to show that in so doing we can reorient to the multiple relations we are in and of, including the troublesome relations of ‘humanity’ and the ‘international’. As Bentley Allan’s important recent intervention Scientific Cosmology and International Orders (2018) shows, and as his opening lines to this chapter indicate, how we think and act in the ‘international’ sphere is fundamentally tied up with our cosmological visions of the universe and our understandings of our role in it. How we understand time, and space, and the relationships between humans, and between humans and non-humans, is central to our political imaginations: for how we see the role of ‘politics’ and the ‘participants’ that count for political dialogue. Further, core International Relations notions, such as ‘balance of power’, the ‘state’, or ‘development’, are also cosmological in origin, even as we often lack awareness of the role that our cosmological background assumptions play in structuring our worldviews and reference points. Our political and social imaginations press on our ways of understanding, being, and becoming in the world, as indeed cosmological assumptions and encounters press on our political visions and structures. And yet, IR rarely thinks about cosmology, and as a result inadvertently accepts a set of implicit cosmological assumptions as its backdrop. As Allan (2018) has recorded, and as this book alongside other analysts of cosmological discourses seeks to show, a particular set of cosmological assumptions, with their origins in a (now scientifically discredited, or surpassed) ‘Newtonian’ set of background assumptions, still dominate in IR—both its scholarship and its practices. In a cosmology inherited from Newton, via ‘modern science’, the rise of the state system, and also through colonialism, we come to see an international political
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world of ‘things’ (e.g. people, states) that ‘move’ (e.g. balance, trade), against ‘backgrounds’ (e.g. resources, the environment) in ‘patterns’ traceable and understandable by ‘us’, ‘humans’, a species often imagined as a special, intelligent agent in charge of ‘figuring out’ and ‘saving’ life on the planet. Such cosmological assumptions are historically powerful but also historically particular. They have origins in monotheistic religions as well as their translations into secular ideas. Yet, they are also problematic assumptions. Not only do Newtonian cosmological assumptions sideline other, more relational ways of seeing the world (in IR see e.g. Kavalski, 2018; Jackson and Nexon, 1999; Qin, 2016; Shilliam, 2015; Agathangelou and Ling, 2009; Querejazu, 2016) but also they are often presented as a set of self-evident ‘truths’ despite having been seriously questioned in scientific studies across disciplines. Cosmological imaginations are often implicit, and they are ‘sticky’. They structure many of the foundational assumptions of how we identify, operate, and relate to the world. But cosmological visions are also contested. And they do shift and can be shifted, in sciences and society. They are not immutable, even as they can be deeply historically embedded. With this in mind, I take up here the challenge Allan sets up: for us not merely to critique our own cosmological assumptions but for us also to ‘think creatively’ about cosmology and to do so with new constituencies in order to help us think about the international, the global, and the planetary in some new ways and as such to be able to open up different political imaginations. This book asks and seeks to answer three guiding questions: • What does it entail to think cosmologically? What does engagement with cosmological science reveal to us about how we might think thoughts anew in the social sciences? • What challenges does relational cosmology in particular pose for the conceptual systems and paradigms of IR (epistemologically, ontologically, ethico-politically)? How does relational cosmology fit in with and extend other forms of relational thinking in social theory and in IR? • What tools—conceptual and otherwise—does a reorientation to the field from this perspective give us as we face the challenges of the twenty-first century? In addressing these questions I try to show that thinking about the subject matter(s) of IR from a relational cosmology orientation shifts our conceptions of knowledge, of the international, and of politics in important ways. Not only do we have to acknowledge that IR scholars already carry around in their concepts specific cosmological assumptions about the universe as indeed the important works of Allan (2018), Bain (2015; 2017), and Mitchell (2014b) have shown, but also that international relations thinking and practices are structured by certain increasingly problematic cosmological assumptions which derive
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from unacknowledged, often theological, and almost always unscrutinized, sources. And in this book I also seek to go beyond the excellent analyses of Bain, Mitchell, and Allan, to attempt to develop a next step: a dialogue on how we might reorient cosmologically. In drawing on relational cosmology, a perspective initially developed in the ‘natural sciences’ among cosmologists, I argue that ‘substantialism’—the tendency to think in terms of ‘things’ (e.g. states or individuals) ‘interacting’ (e.g. balancing or cooperating) is no longer a plausible starting point, even as it still seems ‘commonsensical’ to many of us (Jackson and Nexon, 1999: 299). Nor is the conception of positivist knowledge construction based on neutral observations and identification of laws of human behavior the essence of ‘science of society’ (Kurki, 2008; Kavalski, 2018). Nor can we assume an uncritical focus in IR or the social sciences on solving of ‘human coordination problems’ on a global scale. The ‘human’, the ‘social’, and the ‘global’ in fact emerge as problems to be undone rather than solutions to build on. Such conceptual orientations too have been ‘made’ (see e.g. Descola, 2013; Van Munster and Sylvest, 2016) and can be unmade in how we process the world. While I call for us to think ‘anew’ with relational cosmology, it should be noted at the outset that this does not entail ‘all new thinking’. Rather it entails recognition of the ways in which relational revolution is already afoot in the ‘natural’ and the ‘social’ sciences, and indeed in IR, partly because of developments in science, partly because of changing power relations in societies and between them, including decolonization of our conceptual frameworks, and partly because of what the sciences and humanities are discovering—empirically and conceptually—about our history and our processing in the world. This book tries to show, from one relational perspective in dialogue with others, why we should embrace this relational revolution and how we might extend it and develop it—without making relational thinking another ‘heavy’ meta-physical paradigm or ideology. In this book I try to build a bridge between relational cosmology, relational social theory, and critical theory to develop both IR and the sciences and the conversations between them. I hope, then, that this book may help not just IR scholars but also cosmological and ‘natural’ scientists who seek to increasingly develop their own thinking in relation to today’s political struggles. In what follows in this introduction, I explain how I proceed in our exploration of relational thinking. But at the outset, it might be useful for us to directly address some ‘aversions’, which are likely to arise in the reader when encountering a project on scientific cosmology in the study of international relations.
Aversions to Thinking with Science and Cosmology This attempt to converse with scientific cosmologists will most likely be associated in the minds of many readers with the efforts of other IR theorists, perhaps
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notably Alex Wendt’s Quantum Mind (2015; initially introduced in Wendt, 2006), to develop new syntheses of natural and social science. Some readers may be enthusiastic to read on for this very reason, yet some others will be inclined to dismiss this book with the same sleight of hand which Wendt’s important work suffered in some quarters of IR. Two main problems are likely to bother the critics. First, some readers from IR in particular may be screaming: ‘Not another discipline, scientific cosmology! Are we IR scholars really supposed to master another science! And, why should we think on what it is the task of other sciences to think on? Does not taking on another discipline (as ill-trained apprentices) disturb our own focus of study?’ Second, the reader might be wondering: what kind of guarantees can I provide that my ‘natural scientific’ interlocutor (relational cosmology) is ‘right’? How can I prove that I am drawing on the ‘right’ strand of scientific cosmology to ‘base’ my theoretical explorations in social science? Wendt, it was argued by critics (e.g. De Canio, 2017; Patoma¨ki, 2017) drew on an obscure strand of quantum theory which is unlikely to be correct, leaving the speculative synthesis he developed in the Quantum Mind very speculative indeed. Both criticisms are important to discuss at the outset. First, while I share with Wendt very little in terms of focus or substantive arguments—this book is neither about quantum theory or about its applications in collective settings, nor do I develop as bold a set of claims as Wendt does around translation of quantum science to social science—I do share with him a drive to develop more, and bolder, cross-disciplinary ventures. This is because scholars in the social sciences and IR are not the only ones that ‘think hard’ on how to address the complex social problems in the world around us, nor are they the only ones who have big, difficult challenges in so doing. I claim here that it is useful for us to think with, think alongside, and think through those others who also try to understand the human condition (and our relationships with non-humans) on macro-scales. These others include here scientific cosmologists, in particular Lee Smolin (1997; 2008; 2014) and Carlo Rovelli (2014; 2016), but also critical ‘social’ theorists and critical (or as they are also known post-) humanists (Latour 2004a; 2004b; 2007; Haraway 1997; 2016; Braidotti, 2013; Barad, 2007; Cudworth and Hobden, 2011; 2017). The difficulty of cross-disciplinary efforts arises not from the subject matter itself (many subject matters within disciplines are difficult) but rather from the conventional and, as we will see, far from straightforward separation of ‘humans’ from ‘nature’ and ‘human and social sciences’ from the ‘natural sciences’. As we explore here, perhaps there is no such thing as a ‘Society’, or such thing as ‘Nature’ (Latour, 2004b; 2007; 2017). If so, scientists and humanists are all in the ‘same boat’ in trying to understand their surroundings. In this context it is useful to think together rather than to think apart. Social scientists and humanities scholars can benefit from thinking through natural science puzzles and natural
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sciences will benefit from social scientific and humanities reflections on how they frame issues. However, the aim here is not just to be critical of ‘natural’ and ‘social’ scientific ‘frames’ which can mislead. This conversation is also engendered out of a dissatisfaction with IR and its conceptual universes. I argue that as ‘children of international relations’ (Booth, 2017) our thoughts in and around the field of IR and international politics are also inherently troublesome in distinct ways. In IR too, and in our political communities, we inherit many of our key concepts— states, sovereignty, national interest—from our disciplines, our states, our mothers. But we need to probe our conceptual tropes for they not only have their origins in specific political struggles and ideologies, but also, simultaneously, in the conceptual tropes of science, philosophy, and theology. Indeed, scientific thought we will see is tied up with political and theological thought and vice versa. You cannot understand the American political system, for example, without understanding the role of Newtonian mechanics in shaping early liberalism (Foley, 1990). And you cannot understand ‘anarchy’ as a conceptual premise of IR if you cannot appreciate the cosmological beliefs of Hobbes and their origins in specific theological perspectives (Bain, 2015; Bain, forthcoming). The entire international order is premised on cosmological visions that arise in part from the sciences, and their theological legacies. Indeed, the international order itself, and the purposes of states themselves, evolve in conjunction with and shaped are by cosmological discourses of science and religion (Allan, 2018). This is why thinking carefully on science, philosophy, theology, and the cosmos matters also for IR: whether we like it or not, our vocabularies in IR are premised unconsciously on conceptual systems aligned with certain understandings of the cosmos but also, as such, specific understandings of God, science, physics, and philosophy. I hope to show that the current ‘separation’ of the social sciences and IR from the ‘natural sciences’ has distinct origins and also presents certain fundamental problems and challenges for the field of IR and simultaneously for life on the planet. We should think ‘social’ science again and think again with, rather than apart from, the ‘natural’ sciences. Science, I will argue, is also part of ‘politics’ and, conceived anew, can be part of a new kind of relational democratic politics. As for the second challenge, am I right to assume relational cosmology is ‘right’ and that it is thus ‘safe’ to build on? We explore relational cosmology in more detail from chapter 3 onwards, but before we do, it is important to clarify that I do not assume that relational cosmology is ‘right’ per se. This is because, while sciences get at ‘something real’, it is not the task of the sciences to ‘capture the truth’ for us social scientists to ‘base’ our social theories on. This would be to presume a very curious understanding of the role of the sciences, and indeed of social science, an understanding which we will challenge here. The relationships between sciences and between sciences and the ‘world’ are more complex, and more intriguing, than such a framing allows for.
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As we will see in the following chapters, the view of sciences that emerges from relational cosmology calls on us to abandon a ‘God’s eye view’ of sciences. Sciences do not provide truths for us but are attempts to ‘re-approximate’ the world by situated knowers. Science is philosophy and philosophy is science. And both are inextricably bound up with ‘politics’ and how we think society and ‘ethics’. Which scientific theories, then, are ‘right’ is, on its own, the wrong question to ask. When we do science we think in the context of the recalcitrance of the world to our thinking and this allows and disallows us to think in certain ways. But our theories are not ‘the truth’, even as some are more convincing than others. Relational cosmology is one way of thinking which has been made possible by developments in experimentation, conceptual development, and technical advances in astronomy. And it is an approach which has a lot of promise—in the ‘natural sciences’ and in the ‘social sciences’—by way of thinking. It is ‘worth’ developing further for these reasons (elaborated on in chapter 3), even as it is not necessarily the ‘truth’ that serves as a foundational ‘base’. *
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But what of those readers who might now be thinking: ‘Knowing more about the Universe is all very interesting—Brian Cox and Carl Sagan productions are very intriguing—but surely we know what thinking on the cosmos gives us! It gives us a reorientation to our meagre existence on the planet, a humility in engagement with the world, and perhaps even a reinforced belief in harmony and cooperation between humans on the planet for, in a cosmic setting, we do seem to share a great deal, not least a duty to protect our little corner of the cosmos!’ It is, indeed, surprising that the cosmos is frequently quoted as a context which pushes us to cooperate more and to embrace our responsibilities on the planet. Thinking on the cosmos does indeed already have important political effects. One example of how such cosmo-visioning shapes political discourse is evident at the start of David Biello’s Unnatural World: The Race to Remake Civilisation in Earth’s Newest Age (2016). Eager to explain the woes of humanity in the context of the Anthropocene, Biello starts his account with a description of the image of the Earth photographed by the moon explorers and argues that this image showed to us that humans inhabit a small, vulnerable, ‘space ship’ of a planet. It is this image which incites in us a sense of the planet’s worth and preciousness and asserts to us that it is in need of protection. The image calls on us to see that we are the guardians of this planet. As Biello (2016: 7) puts it: ‘we must accept the responsibility that comes with the power that humanity now possesses. We must begin to manage the planet, slowly, carefully, with room for both error and improvement.’ On a slightly different note, those highlighting the oncoming ecological extinction also call for a ‘wider view’ on our condition via a cosmic perspective. As Leakey (1996: 6) argues: ‘in order to know ourselves as a species and to understand our place in the universe of things, we have to distance ourselves from our own
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experience, both in space and time.’ To see the ecological collapse coming, we must ‘pull out’ from our parochial settings—temporally as well as spatially—to appreciate a wider cosmic history of life, and death of life, through repeated mass extinctions. Another example of ‘cosmic’ thinking, this time in IR context, is provided by Anthony Burke. It is rare—and welcome—to see an IR scholar take an interest in the development of a ‘cosmic perspective’ as Burke does (perhaps most directly in his ‘A good state, from a cosmic point of view’ article; Burke, 2013a). Yet, arguably, Burke too falls prey to rather too readily available and conventional cosmo-tropes. Not only does he join Biello in citing the Earth Rise image as an origin of a new global sensibility, but he also associates cosmic thinking with the idea that the universe is big and renders us small, more humble, and more lucky to be alive. Awareness of the cosmos causes him to argue that we must now have a better sense of our new responsibilities. If we do not act to save the planet, who will? Yet, Burke does not question what a ‘cosmic’ perspective is. It is assumed we know what cosmic perspective is; that it is ‘readily available’ to us. As I will try to argue here, there is nothing simple about what a cosmic perspective implies and we need to be far more critical of such cosmic images, for these in fact emanate from specific origins which relational cosmology challenges. Indeed, I suggests here that we should think cosmologically beyond ‘popular cosmology’—as interesting and important as pop cosmology tropes have been in educating the general public on the ‘wonders of the cosmos’. And I suggest we must think hard about cosmology, for it is not ‘obvious’ what our newly acquired knowledge means for how we should make sense of the world around us. Indeed, from a relational cosmology perspective what cosmology does not do is provide a new perspective ‘from above’ that helps us understand the parochial nature of our own existence, thus enabling cooperative capacities amongst humans and new responsibilities towards animals. Nor does it necessarily generate a new ‘responsibility’ for us to ‘safeguard’ the planet. I argue that to think through relational cosmology requires much more than the passing references to cosmic contexts imply. It requires instead far more uncomfortable attempts to re-relate and re-conceptualize and it requires acknowledgement of our limitations as knowers and ethical actors. And, it requires a critical sensibility towards the (historically understandable and socially attractive) efforts to use cosmic arguments to ‘pull us away’ from the planet or to re-establish human mastery over it. To paraphrase Justin Rosenberg’s (2016) description of IR as existing in a ‘Prison of Political Science’, we are in prisons of various conceptual kinds in this field. One of them is the prison of the ‘all-too-social social sciences’ (which I discuss in more detail below) and another the tendency to revert to existing storylines and inherited conceptual universes. Relational cosmology makes things more ‘difficult’ for us, but also allows us to escape some of these conceptual
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prisons. It promises no final solution—and it comes with issues of its own—but it does urge us to ‘think!’, further, harder, about cosmology and science but also, as such, about ‘us’, ‘others’, our conceptual biases, our political blind spots, and our ethical commitments to humans and non-humans.
Three Orienting Challenges As the discussion has perhaps already revealed, the challenges of dealing with cosmology are complex ones and require us to challenge many intuitions and conceptual habits comfortable to us. To provide the reader with an initial sense of some of these issues we will take on, I discuss below three orienting challenges we will be faced with here. First, I address in more detail the problems emanating from the ‘all-too-social’ social scientific theories. A good deal of existing literature already points to the problems involved in assuming that the ‘social’ sciences, in isolation, can solve our problems. I take the orienting puzzle of these literatures as my guiding hunch as I develop my own explorations of scientific cosmology. Second, I wish to examine briefly the puzzles involved in studying social and natural cosmologies, a thematic returned to in chapters 1 and 2. There is a complex relationship between ‘social’ and ‘natural’ scientific studies of cosmology and I wish to give the reader an initial sense of what is at stake in the development of a ‘route through’ them via realist philosophy and relational cosmology. Third, I examine what such an investigation might bring to problems of IR theory or IR’s conceptual commitments—a line of argumentation picked up and developed in more detail in the later chapters.
Are Social Sciences ‘All-Too-Social Scientific’? Debates in the social sciences, including IR, about what social science involves and entails and how it might differ in its subject matter from the ‘hard’ sciences have been endemic. In many ways social sciences were premised on the ‘differences’ that they have from the ‘hard’ sciences (see e.g. Wight, 2006; Jackson, 2011; Patoma¨ki, 2002, King, Keohane, and Verba, 1994). Indeed, much of my own earlier work has revolved around explorations of the implications for social theory and philosophy of science of these orientations (Kurki, 2006; 2007; 2008; 2009). Is it the distinctly ‘social’ nature of ‘social ontology’, which justifies the need for the social sciences? How are the methods and epistemologies of social sciences distinct from those of the natural sciences and what implications arise for the kind of ‘science’ that IR or other social sciences might be deemed to be?
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As interesting and important as these questions are—I continue to think that it is important for practising social scientists in IR and outside it to actively reflect on these questions rather than simply going off to ‘study the world’ without so doing (see also Jackson, 2011; Reus-Smit, 2013)—it is also important to note that in recent years an interesting set of interventions have started calling into question the obsession with precisely these kinds of questions. Various lines of inquiry into the ‘all-too-social’ nature of social sciences are present today. Two main strands of such thinking may be distinguished: new materialist philosophies and theories, and various new types of ‘social’ analysis. New materialism challenges strands of ‘old materialism’ for which materiality appears as inert, passive, and also as ‘out there’, as distinct from ideas or meanings (see e.g. Coole, 2013; Connolly, 2013b). Instead, new materialism emphasizes the ways in which materiality is not only not inert but also not really ‘out there’: somehow an inanimate, meaningless context for actions of ‘humans’. New materialism emphasizes the vitality of matter and the ways in which ‘we’ and all life and non-life are part of processes of moving together. As Coole and Frost (2010: 8) argue: new materialism insists ‘on describing active processes of materialization of which embodied humans are an integral part, rather than the monotonous repetitions of dead matter from which human subjects are apart.’ It follows that, crucially, society is material and real, but this is not all: ‘our material lives are always culturally mediated, but they are not only cultural’ (see e.g. Coole and Frost, 2010: 27). These new ways of investigating materiality sought to challenge the ‘exhausted’ Marxist materialism of old and also classical forms of constructivism. They also sought to bring together various sciences in new kinds of ways and crucially take on ‘old’ physics, especially, ‘Newtonian mechanics . . . especially important for . . . older materialists’ (Coole and Frost, 2010: 5). The new materialists wish to raise new kinds of questions about disciplinary boundaries and ontology, but also about agency, causation, epistemology, and ethics in a world after modernism and its neat distinctions based on old materialist ontologies. If we assumed there was a ‘world out there’ once, new materialists are interested in the processing, selforganization, and the ‘becoming’ of matter (Coole and Frost, 2010: 10). Thus, new materialism has not called for a ‘return’ to philosophical realism of the old (world is real) but rather for the development of new forms of realism sensitive to the new conceptualization of matter (see eg. Coole and Frost, 2010: 11; Bryant, Srnicek, and Harman, 2011). New materialism and ‘speculative realisms’ were in part motivated by the work of Deleuze and Guattari (2013 [1987]) on rhizomes and assemblages and also De Landa’s work A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History (1997). These works sought to set out a ‘flat’ reading of societal history together with, assembled with, geological, biological, genetic, and informational structures, connections, unfoldings. Bruno
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Latour’s work (2004b; 2007; 2010) has famously extended similar lines of thought albeit through different entry points. Latour is interested in the sciences and how they work, how scientists relate, form assemblages with their ‘objects’ and what it is that the ‘Science’ (beliefs/ideology of Science) in their work does to the ‘science’ (actual practices) they engage in. He is also interested in how we think of nature and us and their interrelations, seeking to undo classical conceptions of nature, humanity, and political ecology (Latour, 2004b; 2007; 2017). Donna Haraway and Isabelle Stengers build similar ways of conceiving of sciences through a coming-together of human and non-human subjects. Haraway speaks in terms of naturecultures (2007), cyborgs (1991), companion species (2003) and string figures (2017): each term avoiding association with either ‘social’ or ‘natural’ ‘homes’. Stengers’ (2010) cosmopolitics seeks to account for sciences through the factish realities they live by and create. Each is directly critical of the idea that sciences study objects ‘out there’ separate from those who study them. Indeed, the separations of nature and culture, subject and object, reality and knowledge about it are precisely undone in these lines of work. These critiques are extended by complexity theory and posthumanism (see e.g. Braidotti, 2013; Cudworth and Hobden, 2011, 2017; Cudworth, Hobden, and Kavalski, 2018b; Kaltoffen, 2018). For such perspectives, humanism is seen as an ideology which ‘elevates’ the human and the social above the rest of being but also in so doing misunderstands the human as part of the ecosystem and geological history, how the human is ‘made’ in its wider relationalities. All these diverse social theoretical and philosophical lines of thought are contributed to by those interested in exploring the implications for social science of quantum theory. Karen Barad’s work has been pioneering in this regard: her book Meeting the Universe Half-Way (2007) sets out an intriguing philosophy of the ‘social’ world through its explication of Bohr’s quantum physics. Quantum physics melts into the ‘social’: indeed the two are not separable. We, as indeed everything in the universe, ‘intra-act’ in the universe of materialization of meanings, with important ethical as well as ontological consequences (developed in IR recently by Zanotti, 2018). From a somewhat similar line of thought Alexander Wendt (2015; 2006) has set out the need to rethink the ontology and epistemology of social sciences through a pan-psychist reading of quantum mechanics and what it would mean to think through quantum consciousness. If these lines of thought are ‘new’ ‘interdisciplinary’ interventions into the scene of ‘social theory’, they of course build on much older and more established traditions of thought on the relationship between social and physical. Many of the new materialist writers for example are influenced by Alfred North Whitehead’s (1978) organicism, a metaphysical system Whitehead constructed to understand the universe in totality as a relational set of processes. Others refer to non-Western cosmologies as a way to rethinking natural and social sciences (e.g. Kohn, 2013; Duara, 2015). Indeed, important inter-connections between eastern religions and
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new materialist relationalities have been pointed to even in recent work in IR (Fierke, 2019). As rich as these developments are, important to consider are also the various efforts at ‘Big History’ writing. In historical analysis too, methodological nationalism and humanism is under fire, most interestingly in the efforts to move away from writing the history of particular societies and as such to an effort of writing history beyond the human. Indeed, the subject of big history includes everything from the origin of the universe to today’s social formations (Spier, 2015; Harari, 2016; Ward and Kirschvink, 2015). In somewhat similar vein, Norbert Elias’s figurational sociology sought to position all human knowledge within the history of the universe, the earth, and evolution, but in so doing called on us to think through the limitations and the necessities for ‘detachment’ and ‘involvement’ of us as knowers in what it is that we seek to know (Elias, 1987). Each of these interventions, in their own way, calls into question the structure of the ‘sciences’. They propose that the ‘social’ sciences are a curious historical invention tied to the creation (conceptually) of Nature, Science, and Human. We must then be wary of the ‘all-too-social’ nature of the social sciences and the construction of separate entities ‘Nature’ and ‘Society’ in the natural and social scientific discourses. These too are constructions that are historical, not ‘given’. This book is motivated by a hunch that these perspectives are ‘onto something’, that they present an important challenge to social science thinking today that should be taken seriously. Indeed, they become part of the story I develop later in the book. Yet I do not start here with the existing openings; I start instead from thinking from relational cosmology. We will see that starting from relational cosmology helps in part to understand why new materialist and new social analysis orientations are so fruitful for redirecting engagements with the sciences (‘natural’ and ‘social’). We will also see that to defend them and to further develop them we benefit from putting them in the conversational frame of relational cosmology. Thinking together relational social theory and relational cosmology can develop an orientation to the world which challenges the ‘division of labour’ arguments, which have enforced the separation of the sciences. This book will argue that it serves certain interests and certain conceptions of the world to divide the world in ways traditionally proposed into social and natural. To understand our predicament, including the power of ideological constructions over how we think the world, opening up to the world anew with relational cosmology can help us undo the artificial categories which structure our images of the world and political commitments in it. We are then called on here to be open-minded about science, about ‘social’ and ‘natural’ science, and we are invited here to ‘think them together’. But if this is so, what on earth do I mean by an interest in ‘scientific’ cosmology?
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Cosmology Cosmology, according to Audra Mitchell, can be understood as: ‘images of the universe which shape the beliefs of a particular group of people. It offers a symbolic order, which designates the place of all beings in the universe and their ‘proper’ relations to another’ (Mitchell, 2014b: 10). This definition provides us a useful starting point for orienting ourselves to the study of cosmology (although I also take issue with this definition in two ways). It is a useful starting point because it demonstrates the pervasiveness of cosmological beliefs in social systems. Most of our language, our explanations, our ways of relating to the world and knowledge, are structured by the symbolic orders provided by cosmological assumptions we make. What is the world made of ? Are there laws in the universe or on this planet? What is the nature of humans visà-vis animals or plants? Who do we have ethical commitments to? All these types of questions are deeply dependent on the cosmologies, and related (secular) theologies we draw on to build our ‘images of the universe’ and ‘relations’ between ourselves and others in it. We cannot avoid having resolved such questions as background assumptions in our discourses; hence, cosmological assumptions are all-pervasive. This book then calls for IR theorists to pay attention to cosmological background assumptions, where they derive from and how they structure how we think, also in IR. In thinking through these assumptions, we are faced with study of history of science, historical mythologies, theological structures of thought, and power relations, including colonialism. In later chapters we will dig into (some of ) the cosmological structures of thought that inform much of our common sense and social theories today. But why might one take issue with Mitchell’s useful definition? First, let’s note that Mitchell refers to human beings’ cosmology: that is humans’ beliefs about themselves in the cosmos. Yet, this book orients to the subject somewhat differently. It starts not from ‘human beliefs’ per se but is intrigued by implications of ‘scientific knowledge’ for our human beliefs. Scientific knowledge is ‘on the face of it’ ‘human’ in that it is conducted by (what we often consider) ‘human’ actors and is written in ‘social’ contexts, which shape the nature of that scientific knowledge. Despite this, the scientific study of cosmology receives an attentive study here. Why this should be so, needs to be addressed in detail (as it will be in chapter 1). What makes a scientific as opposed to a religious cosmology, for example, given the close ties between science and theology in framing even secular cosmologies? And is not all scientific cosmology ultimately dependent on socially and politically inherited conceptual systems? The book makes a commitment to exploring scientific cosmology because it is argued that scientific cosmology, while conducted by (what we often call)
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‘humans’ in ‘social’ settings reflecting their conceptual legacies, nevertheless does more. Scientific cosmology is about probing relations in the universe. Cosmology is in part about the universe resisting our ideas about it. As such it can also provide an important ‘check’ on our cosmological beliefs. Indeed, this is how I see the role of cosmological science here; it is, while human and socially engendered, also a way of mediating, and being vulnerable, to ‘the world’. Cosmology is not just about studying human social orders and beliefs but also about appreciating scientific cosmology as a form of human thought resisted by the cosmos (or whatever we call ‘it’). In this frame, not all cosmological knowledge then is ‘equivalent’. I believe that processes in the cosmos are, and can be, mediated by (always limited) situated knowers and that in this process it is not just ‘social’ cosmologies that are implicated but the relations we share in the cosmos too. Cosmology as it is understood here is not reducible to human beliefs about the cosmos. Cosmology is not just ‘ideas and beliefs’ we hold about the cosmos: cosmology is the study of unfolding of processes in the cosmos, including ideas of it. It requires that we see the science of cosmology as linked to, as mediating towards, something ‘beyond’ our concepts. This is why science, and scientific cosmology, ‘matter’ in part; they make us and our ideas vulnerable to the world, and this matters ( for) how we may think our thoughts and how we relate to and in the world. Another reason to take issue with Mitchell’s definition is that it suggests that cosmologies are symbolic orders which are somehow relatively ‘closed’. Of course, they evolve historically, and, once formed, they can go relatively ‘unquestioned’. This is the case for many of the religious cosmologies and equally for many of the core tenets of Western secular common-sense cosmology. However, again, some nuances are required to bring out what scientific cosmology brings to the picture. Contrary to religious cosmologies, which no doubt penetrate our thoughts and even science, a key aspect of cosmological science today is that it does not take cosmological assumptions for granted but interrogates them. This includes trying to devise ways of testing cosmological theories; a troubled but important aspect of cosmology. This means, as chapter 2 seeks to show, that scientific cosmologies are not fixed, closed, systems but often short-lived, always approximating and speculative but nevertheless scientifically premised (and thus open as well as systematic) propositions that approximate in new ways that which we do not ‘know’ or find difficult to conceptualize due to our limitations as (situated) knowers. Chapters 1, 2, and 3 will orient the reader to cosmology and what studying it— socially, scientifically, and social scientifically—entails. We will orient ourselves to ‘human’ cosmologies, ‘scientific’ cosmologies, and indeed the ‘cosmos’ and will explore specifically the insights of a relational cosmology, which brings these together in interesting ways. Relational cosmology is interesting because it heightens our awareness of the ways in which sciences, philosophy, and politics ‘move together’. Social sciences inherit and owe much to natural sciences, and vice versa.
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Explicit exploration of these legacies, but also what sciences say as they probe the world, is, then, necessary also in the social sciences. In facing up to this we are also forced to recognize that sciences today may be telling us something about how we should try to deal with the ‘social’ and the ‘international’—dangerous propositions for the committed humanists in the humanities and social sciences! This uncomfortable thinking together is called for here because I am interested in investigating the nature and consequences of a relational revolution in the sciences and in society (see also Smolin, 1997). Alongside Lee Smolin, I argue that such a revolution is suggested by the recent developments in sciences—especially cosmology but also particle physics, biology, geology, information theory, social science, and history. Across scientific and humanities fields, essentialisms are under fire and relational theories and cross-disciplinary entanglements are afoot. I am interested in studying what this relational revolution, embodied in relational cosmology, might mean for the sciences and within them specifically for the discipline of ‘International Relations’. How should we think in the field when the assumptions about laws, individuals, thing-like states, and their mechanistic interactions is taken from us, when they become ‘unthinkable’ in Haraway’s words? How do we adjust? How do we think IR? What kinds of new alliances and opportunities to see the international political world anew arise?
Relationality and Rethinking IR International Relations is an area of study classically conceived to be focused on analysis of human conflict and cooperation on the planet. The role of states and state conflict has been central to such analyses since states seem to mediate, and initiate, many of the conflicts and cooperative mechanisms globally. Since the ‘postpositivist’ and ‘transnationalist’ critiques of the 1980s and 1990s, IR has incrementally veered away from state-centrism, however. Today the subject matters of IR encompass wide foci: analysis of not just hard power but also institutions and development; analysis of not just war and conflict but also environment and gender; analysis not just of state actors but also of NGOs, private citizens, and classes. Transnational and global relations and network analyses highlight nonstate-based ‘relations’ as foci of modelling and understanding. While the worldviews, ontologies, methods, and theories of the discipline have widened, rightly, to encompass new important objects of study, from a relational cosmology perspective it appears that there are a worrying set of biases that inhabit this discipline still. This is because problematic philosophical bases underpin in particular how relations—whether international or global—are imagined, both in (‘real-world’) international relations and in the (academic discipline of ) International Relations. The notions of relations in IR are not in line with the
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provocations relational cosmology puts forward in terms of how to think relations and relationality. For example, IR’s ontology of relations has tended to: 1. privilege the study of ‘things’ (such as states, individuals) against ‘backgrounds’ (material resources, environment); 2. reduce ‘relations’ to ‘interactions’ of things (international relations, transnational relations, networks of ‘nodes’); 3. prioritize ‘humans’ and their interactions as the core subject matter of IR (international and global as societal and human coordination problems). These underpinning orientations to thinking ‘relationally’ arise from IR’s social and political legacies, and indeed its theological and cosmological origins. As William Bain (2015; 2017; forthcoming) has showed us, the cosmological and theological legacies of IR are profound for IR’s conceptual order, and as Allan’s (2018) analyses shows, international order itself cannot be made sense of without understanding the history of scientific ideas translated to make sense of the ‘international’. This work seeks, then, to challenge such ontologies of relations. I try to show in chapters 5, 6, and 7 that some important things about how we think international relations and International Relations changes if we think about relations differently, with different cosmological background assumptions. Building on relational cosmology together with specific strands of relational social theory, I try to elaborate what it might mean to think relations without things, relations as ‘thoroughgoing’ and relations as ‘shooting through’ ‘levels of analysis’. I argue, via relational cosmology, that different cosmological visions—relational in a more challenging manner—can be imagined beyond the historical presentism, methodological nationalism, and humanism which has tied up our IR imaginations of relations. Relational thinking developed here breaks through the ‘social’ and ‘natural’ and exposes us to the ‘mesh’ (Morton, 2010) of relationalities which ‘shoot’ through us, the political, the international, and the global. As such it creates new conversations around relationality and what IR’s conceptual horizons have done to blind us to the relations that (also) matter. Indeed, in the mesh we are challenged in how we relate to not only ‘humans’ but also ‘non-humans’. It is no longer clear-cut who matters, what our communities are, and how worlds relate to each other. We are called to stretch our concepts, our relations, our ethical response-abilities. In developing such thoughts I do not travel alone. Important work in IR has been undertaken in this relational direction. For example, Heikki Patoma¨ki (2007; 2017; Patoma¨ki and Steger, 2010) has helped us think beyond traditional IR frameworks through big history and new political myth-making. Cudworth and Hobden’s
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(2011; 2013; 2017) efforts to develop complexity theory and posthumanism have reshaped the field and my own thoughts deeply. Others yet have analysed the troublesome origins of IR’s ontology in reference to Western and colonial thinking and have sought to open up new culturally more global interpretations of relations (Agathangelou and Ling, 2009; Querejazu, 2016; Shilliam, 2015; Blaney and Tickner, 2017; see also Allan, 2018). Qin (2016) has put forward a relational theory of world politics which rejects individual rationality and substantialism in-built in much of IR. And Kavalski (2018) has pointed towards a relational ontology which challenges IR theory’s ‘Columbus syndrome’ with the help of guanxi, a notion arising out of Chinese relational thought. These openings, and others, towards more relational and also more ‘global IR’ (Acharya, 2016) travel in part in the same direction, and in conversation with, relational cosmology developed here. Yet, I also seek to make a modest contribution to the relational revolution afoot in IR and beyond it. I seek to put forward a framework within which one can: include ‘Western’ science in the conversation on how to think more relationally; think sciences (natural and social) together; and in so doing remain attuned to the limits of knowledge and concepts, while still holding on to the possibility of building new democratic communities by ‘re-relating’ to world(s)—human and non-human—around us. What emerges is a perspective which appreciates the importance and ‘stickiness’ of IR’s conceptual orientations but also the need to shift our vocabularies to re-engage humans, plants, animals, technology, and bacteria in political negotiations. Indeed, relational cosmology as developed here points towards a ‘planetary politics’ perspective which would allow IR to loosen its humanist and Newtonian commitments a little; hopefully enough to allow the rest of the world(s) into its purview and thus to ‘shake it’ to re-align with the complex planetary challenges which traditional vocabularies fail to capture.
Argument and How I Proceed The challenge for this book is to take on the existing scientific cosmologies and place them in a conversation with current social ontologies and theories and ultimately with current International Relations imaginations. The aim is to explicate what kinds of shifts of mind and concepts scientific cosmology might entail in thinking about ‘social’ ontology. It is also an attempt to explore what it does to IR to be explored from this angle: are there biases, slippages, and cosmological dead ends troubling our subject, troubling how we try and deal with, shape and analyse international politics? I will argue that a relational revolution in IR, social sciences as well as physics is both on the way and necessary for us to engage with, and we might as well think through what it indicates and how it opens up routes for thought and action through the world.
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In particular I argue the following: • that we must note, and tackle, the relative absence of reflection on the role of cosmology in IR: we can and should develop better awareness of the deep role of cosmological background assumptions in shaping the field and also practices of international politics; • that we must bring together natural and social sciences on cosmology: neither, separately, resolves the difficulty of cosmological thinking but both together can be part of cosmological revisioning; • that relational cosmology provides an important starting point for rethinking cosmologically in IR: its emphases on processes over things, situated knowledge over objectivity, and exposure of ‘us’ to the much wider relational entanglements in the universe are important in shifting cosmological background assumptions which have gone unscrutinized in IR; • that from it arise important criticism of existing epistemology, ontology, and ethics in IR: new ways of thinking on limits of knowledge, how we ‘re-relate’ to the mesh we are made of, and how we commit in a relational universe; • and that more open reorientations to politics, in particular planetary politics beyond the international and the global, are thus enabled: exposing ourselves to the ‘mesh’ of relationalities and the limits of our current conceptualizations of politics, democracy, and communities that matter can also redirect us to ‘do IR differently’, in more relational and perhaps also in more ‘attentive’ ways. I should warn the reader that expressing these arguments will become progressively more difficult as we proceed, for increasingly with each step our words start to escape us as we ‘stretch’ away from what seems ‘sensible’ in our (or my) inherited cosmological structures of thought. Yet, I hope the reader is left with a sense of reorientation, a different ‘feeling’ about relations, through this narrative. By the end of the book, when we encounter more familiar IR subjects—for example negotiations around fisheries policy in chapter 7—I hope the reader will agree with me that there is something very curious indeed going on in how IR relates us to the world. While seemingly ‘obvious’ in IR’s conceptual universe, within a relational cosmology there is something strange, and deeply problematic, about a world of international politics where our negotiations with and political commitments around fish can be discussed, without a flinch, in terms of ‘state’ negotiations of ‘access rights’ to ‘(fish as) resources’. If this proposition does not puzzle you at the moment, I hope that by the end of chapter 7, you will relate to IR—and fish—in rather a different way, in a way which is more curious, if not shocked, by the deep-running and rather unashamedly arrogant humanist conceptual commitments embedded in IR’s implicit backdrop cosmology. I will start by discussing the nature of cosmology in Part I. I will explore the relationship between ‘social’ and ‘natural scientific’ cosmologies in chapter 1,
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setting out a position on what this entails which both avoids ‘science glorification’ but also ‘science scepticism’ through building a scientific realist explication of what cosmology is and where it sits in relation to other sciences. On the basis of this position, chapter 2 introduces the reader to various strands of scientific cosmology before moving on to discuss relational cosmology, the basis for this book’s arguments, conceptually, scientifically, and philosophically, in chapter 3. Part II then focuses on making the key theoretical moves of the book based on extrapolation of relational cosmology. Chapter 4 inquires first into the nature of situated knowledge in the cosmos, what it implies for our theory and our methods, indeed our view of science. In chapter 5 I explore the implications of rethinking how we think relations. Specifically, I highlight the need to move to an analysis of a wider set of relations: human and non-human. The final chapter of this section sets out my orientation to ethics; a subject matter of some difficulty for relational orientation of this nature. I argue for a relational ethics in the mesh where we embrace our many immediate response-abilities, despite the absence of moral laws. The last section of the book seeks to put forward a reorientation to IR. In chapter 7 I explore the significance of cosmology for IR, and indeed of IR to our cosmological visions: for the two are more bound up than we think. I also discuss the nature of the possible reorientations IR thinking, alongside a reoriented cosmology developed here, could undergo. In chapter 7 I first set out a critique of the ‘international’ and also of the conceptual tropes globality and ‘global challenges’. I then explore what a ‘planetary’ orientation might mean for thinking on politics and democratic politics more specifically. I bring this planetary orientation into a conversation with the recent debates on ‘planet politics’ in IR and reflect on what ‘relating to relations’ in a relational universe might mean for IR and political imagination. I conclude the book with five ‘light’ and ‘open’ challenges for IR and ir in a relational universe.
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1 Cosmology ‘Social’ and ‘Scientific’
To think of the universe as a whole rather than of something within the universe is one of the two most ambitious tasks that thought can undertake. Nothing matches it in ambition other than our attempts to form a view of ourselves. Yet we cannot cast this topic aside. First, we cannot avoid it because we are driven to understand whatever we can about our place in the world, even if what we know, or might discover, represents only a small and superficial part of the enigmas of nature. Second, we should not seek to escape it because no one can develop and defend ideas about parts of natural reality without making assumptions, even if they remain inexplicit, about nature as a whole. Third, we need not to turn away from it because among the greatest and most startling discoveries of science in recent times are discoveries about the universe and its history. (Unger and Smolin, 2015: x) What kind of things . . . can we learn from the results of the natural sciences which are of cosmological significance today? That question is still as problematic as it ever was, and the fallacious shortcuts by which we are tempted to circumvent those problems remain as enticing as ever. (Toulmin, 1985: 8) Before we delve into the question that animates this book—the study of the implications for International Relations of exploring scientific cosmology (chapter 2) and specifically the assumptions associated with so-called relational cosmology (chapter 3)—this chapter sets out how we should orient and understand the study of ‘cosmology’. The discussion covered here is as important as it is difficult, for it is on the basis of how we relate to the very idea of cosmology that many of our ways of ‘coming at it’ and our beliefs about what we can ‘derive from it’ are determined. This chapter brings to the foreground two somewhat arbitrarily distinguished—for as both Unger and Smolin and Toulmin above highlight, they are deeply mutually implicated—orientations: ‘social’ study of cosmology and ‘scientific’ cosmology.
International Relations in a Relational Universe. Milja Kurki, Oxford University Press (2020). © Milja Kurki. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198850885.001.0001
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For humanists and social scientists cosmology is conceived as a primarily ‘social’ area of study. Since humans have had an intense ‘need to recognize where we stand in the world into which we are born, to grasp our place in the scheme of things and to feel at home within it’ (Toulmin, 1985: 1) to understand cosmological worldviews we must then understand human belief systems and traditions. For literary analysts, anthropologists, sociologists, and historians, cosmology is at its core about studying the social belief systems humans have held at different times and in different places about the order of the world, the universe, and themselves in it. From this perspective, even science of cosmology is built on social mythologies, which we must understand (Toulmin, 1985). This orientation entails that in political sciences and IR too we must be willing to do two things: first, probe the social and political world with a view to the cosmological underpinnings they have (e.g. Bain, 2015; Mitchell, 2014b; Allan, 2018; Querejazu, 2016) and also, second, to explore the political and social underpinnings found in scientific discourses (see e.g. Patomӓki, 2017). In tracing the legacies of cosmological assumptions, it is necessary not only to understand cultural, social, and political dynamics of mythologies, but also to understand theology and religion, for theologies are the most prevalent influences on our cosmologies, even secular ones (Bain, 2015; 2017; forthcoming; Mitchell, 2014b). Yet, this ‘social’ study of cosmology as ‘our beliefs about the cosmos’ receives an ambiguous reaction from those engaged in the science of cosmology, or from ‘scientific cosmology’.¹ While cosmological science is historically emergent from religious and mythical attempts to understand the cosmos, while it is historically and contemporarily partly ‘speculative’, and while it is for sure conducted by ‘humans’, ‘scientific cosmology’ is not simply a ‘belief’ system in the same sense that Judeo-Christian theology is for example. As Jones, Lambourne, and Sergeant (2015: 195) have it, scientific cosmology is ‘a branch of science concerned with the study of the Universe as a whole’, a ‘science’ in which observations and theoretical proof count, not merely ‘beliefs’. Cosmological science is about subjecting human beliefs to test—empirically and conceptually—against each other and against the ‘universe’. I will take issue with the prioritization of either of these orientations—‘social’ or ‘natural’—as I seek to develop a middle ground position on how to study cosmology ‘together’ with both social and natural scientists. Cosmology is neither reducible to ‘beliefs’ or a ‘neutral’ science. Premised on a defence of a scientific realist conception of science, I argue below for one, hopefully productive, way to navigate our way through the troubling waters of social construction and science. Having
¹ Note that what I call scientific cosmology is not what Allan (2018) treats it as. For Allan, scientific cosmology is the beliefs about the cosmos of scientists (of various fields). For me scientific cosmology refers specifically to the science of cosmology, a cross-disciplinary branch of physics seeking to understand the nature of the cosmos on the macro-scales.
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first discussed the ubiquity of cosmological assumptions and their significance, I then set out the two ‘orientations’ to cosmology, and through discussing the limitations of both, set out the via media position which takes seriously ‘scientific cosmology’ but places it in a conversation with social study of cosmology. ‘Science envy!’, ‘Preposterous science-glorification!’, critics might cry. Like Wendt, do I seek to arbitrarily draw on science’s authority? These accusations miss the mark I hope to show: we can be sensitive to ‘social’ construction of our worldviews and ‘natural’ scientists’ concerns about the ‘recalcitrance’ of reality to our social constructions.
Ubiquity of Cosmological Belief Cosmology is a way of making sense of ‘our place in the scheme of things’ (Toulmin, 1985: 1). The notion emerged from Greek, ‘essentially meaning the rational or scientific understanding of the cosmos, a word which to the ancient Greeks carried connotations such as “order”, “regular behavior”, and “beauty” ’ (Kragh, 2007: 1). But it was not the Greeks who introduced cosmological inquiry as a notion. Indeed, fascination with the cosmological seems to have been pressing on human beings ‘ever since . . . [they] first began to reflect about and to discuss, their situation within the world of natural things’ (Toulmin, 1985: 1). Even as this may be so, it is not easy to tell the ‘history’ of cosmology. Why? Because how we tell the history of ‘cosmology’ is, like any history, a contested matter and reflects inevitably particular viewpoints and historical narratives. One relatively conventional narrative, which arguably prioritizes certain European and Asian experiences and also reflects an interest in the rise of the ‘science’ of cosmology, is however relatively well-established and well-developed. It goes something like this. Early human cave dwellers and hunter-gatherers evidentially showed signs of interest in making sense of the cosmos around them: both observationally and in terms of origin stories. Connected with their surroundings, spirits and persons dwelled together in their cosmologies, which Lent (2017) describes as ‘everything is connected’ worldviews. Here ‘humans, animals, ancestor spirits, trees, rocks and rivers—are related parts of a dynamic integrated whole’ (Lent, 2017: 84). But both astronomical and cosmological orientations arguably shifted with the development of agricultural societies, in part due to changing social structures (introduction of systematic social hierarchies), and in part due to changing access to land and vulnerability to success of singular crops. As agricultural societies experienced an increased sense of vulnerability to natural forces (in less rich ecosystems) human societies also turned the eyes to the heavens to seek for order and predictability. The heavens became deemed a source of anxiety, and something to ‘control’, as nature was no longer seen as ‘giving’ (Lent, 2017: 111).
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Relationships with animals also shifted: animal spirits turned to Gods built in the mould of humans and these ‘new gods take on the position of authority’ (Lent, 2017: 112). At the same time, animals became increasingly ‘domesticated’, and processed for purposes of maintaining human communities (Harari, 2016). In Greek and Judeo-Christian cosmologies, which picked up many of the structures of Middle Eastern cosmological thought, Gods became force-giving Gods or a God, which ‘set’ the elements, laws and/or principles of nature (Hodgson, 2005; Kragh, 2011a). In these cosmologies, the natural world becomes increasingly separated from Gods and humans: ‘with a single transcendent creator god, the natural world begins to be seen as merely the recipient of the god’s beneficence rather than the source itself of such powers’ (Lent, 2017: 123). As agricultural societies developed, due to the need for increased predictability regarding climate, more systematic astronomical observations were made. Yet, these did not instigate discernible shifts in cosmological beliefs. Cosmological myths continued to be built around various ‘flat earth’ cosmologies, from Egyptian and Babylonian varieties to Jewish. These cosmological imaginations provided the origins of Greek and also many Asian cosmological frames, not least in the introduction of the idea of ‘spheres’ or ‘levels’, with the Sky and Earth characterized by differential principles of governance (see e.g. Lent, 2017; Kragh, 2007: ch 1). This notion of celestial spheres provided the core orientation too for Aristotle’s cosmology. Drawing on but also extending the efforts of others, from Pythagoras to Democritus, Aristotle sought to ‘save the phenomena’ as Plato had called for: to ‘reduce the apparent motions of planets . . . to uniform circular motions’ (Kragh, 2007: 19). In so doing, Aristotle sought to provide a first physical (rather than simply astronomical) perspective on the cosmos. ‘His spheres were corporeal, not mathematical constructs and his planets and stars were physical bodies attached to a series of interconnected rotating shells’ (Kragh, 2007: 21). Yet, different physical principles of action applied in Aristotle’s different spheres: there were no ‘universal’ rules applicable across the cosmos. While the Aristotelian paradigm became a powerful informant of Islamic thought and in Christian Europe, different cosmological belief systems, backed up by powerful observations, were also developed in South America, North America, the Far East, and Australia. Here, quite distinctive storylines developed—from the Dreamworld of the aboriginal peoples in Australia to the flat world of Mayans and the sophisticated star-gazing cosmology of the Tibetans. In Chinese astronomy the acceptance of ‘change’ in heavens was made; a challenge to the fixed spheres of Aristotle’s cosmos (Kragh, 2007). Yet, the inheritance of the Greek cosmology to increasingly Christian Europe, and then through the conquest of both minds and lands of much of the world by Christian states, the once relatively peripheral Judeo-Christian cosmology gained an increasingly wide audience. The core constituents of the Judeo-Christian
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worldview have travelled in a multiplicity of forms to make up the dominant ‘secular’ cosmology characteristic of much of ‘Western thinking’ and ‘science’ today. The Judeo-Christian cosmology and its various offshoots (including secularism) is one to which we turn in this book a great deal, in part because it is tangled with so much of the ‘science’ on which cosmological science now is based but also because it is, via this idea of science, as we will see, the cosmological origins of ‘IR’s’ conceptual vocabularies.² ‘Science’ emerged out of the monotheistic traditions of thought developed in North Africa and the Middle East. It is built on the theological invocation for children of God to know the world of God. It was God’s will that determined that the task of man was to decode, observe, and deduct the laws of physics (Hodgson, 2005). As Bain (2015: 7) articulates, in monotheistic theologies: There is . . . an indwelling reason that permeates the universe and links God to creation. The universe is rationally intelligible; it discloses a pattern of intrinsic order, so that it is possible to reason from natural phenomena to the first cause, namely God.
This belief, as Bain emphasizes, is important not only for science as an enterprise but also becomes a key background assumption to modern political and international thought. Indeed, much of modern science, and modern cosmology which aspires to science, also harks back to the theological assumptions—a theme which we will see played out in this book. Sometimes the close relationship between cosmology and religious belief is obvious, as with Newton’s cosmology (see chapter 2), sometimes it is implicit, yet rarely is it entirely absent. In either case it is clear that religious, social, and political, and cosmological belief systems tend to be tied together, but in complex and nuanced ways (see e.g. Kragh, 2011a; 2011b, Hetherington, 1993). This initial discussion, limited—and contestable—as it is, reveals some important starting gambits for our discussion here. First, the story emphasizes the ubiquity of cosmological assumptions in history across different parts of the world and highlights the way they tie in with patterns of social life and religious commitments. This story also starts to reveal the close and complex relationship between science and human beliefs and worldviews. And it raises the challenging question: if humans are so embedded in cosmological histories, mythologies, and narratives, how do we study cosmos ‘scientifically’? What counts as a science of a cosmos, or is the only possible story we can tell a ‘social history’ of the evolution of our beliefs about the cosmos? ² Even as it does not ‘own’ the world and indeed different imaginations of international politics and politics can emerge from without it, see e.g. Chan, Mandaville, and Bleiker, 2001; Querejazu, 2016; Blaney and Tickner, 2017.
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Social Scientific Study of Cosmology To study cosmology we need to understand, historically and sociologically, the origins of and the meaning-making structures of worldviews, cultural systems, social and political structures, and indeed of science. This is not easy, not only because such perspectives do not appear to us ‘with ease’—it is hard to understand how people thought outside of our social and conceptual settings—but also because our own cosmological assumptions often blind us to ‘other ways’ of seeing the cosmos. This is why historians, sociologists, and anthropologists urge us to systematically study each others’ belief systems. This is important not only to appreciate the role of often-implicit background assumptions in our own conceptual systems but also to understand why we disagree globally about how we ‘read’ the world around us. The differences between Confucian conceptions of politics and order, for example, from Christian conceptions of them matters; not least because of the different historical, cultural, and conceptual universes within which their role is deciphered. Appreciating the need to better understand varied cosmological assumptions, many humanists and social scientists already have provided us with very good, systematic studies of the ‘social’ or ‘socially inherited’ cosmologies that drive societies. There is a rich social history of theology as it pertains to cosmology (e.g. Hodgson 2005) and there are the histories of science, which help us understand the rise of cosmological science in Europe and in Islamic world (e.g. Kragh, 2007; 2011b; 2015; Saliba, 2011). And in social theory we have made many attempts to try and grasp the nature of the secular social order through analysis of its cosmological and theological assumptions (e.g. Taylor, 2007; Kragh, 2004; Millbank 1990). And the sociological and anthropological traditions in social sciences have long investigated the belief systems of various populations and cultures around the world (e.g. Kohn, 2013; Duara, 2015). We even have an initial set of attempts of a cosmological understanding in IR. William Bain’s (2015; 2017a; 2017b); Bentley Allan’s (2018); and Audra Mitchell’s (2014b) works are of particular significance in this regard. They have shown the importance of cosmological structures for how IR theorists imagine ‘anarchy’, ‘balance of power’, and ‘intervention’. We also have explorations of cosmology and IR in the non-Western context: studies which emphasize also the tendency of Anglo-American IR to ‘erase’ other cosmologies (Chan, Mandaville, and Bleiker, 2001; Querejazu, 2016; Agathangelou and Ling, 2009; Kavalski, 2018; Blaney and Tickner, 2017). It is important to understand, however, how cosmology is predominantly oriented to in these studies. Here, cosmology relates primarily to the beliefs that people, societies, or religions have of the ‘ordered’ nature of the cosmos: how they believe the world to be structured. Social scientists and historians tend to suggest that
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we have to, first, investigate the understandings of the cosmos through time and the patterns of social reproduction of particular belief systems—Mesopotamian belief systems travelling to Jewish myths, Greek cosmologies investing in JudeoChristian belief systems, or colonial power relations influencing modern science. It is assumed that the social evolution of human beliefs about the cosmos have important implications for the very premises of scientific study of the cosmos, for one of the key insights of social study of cosmological beliefs has been the realization that the entirety of modern science and the science of cosmology itself arise from certain assumptions, assumptions we can understand through a more detailed analysis of history of cosmology whether it be study of Islamic thought, Asian traditions, or Judeo-Christian theology. What on earth, then, can we understand by the notion scientific cosmology, or more precisely, can there be a ‘scientific’ cosmology beyond stories we have learned to tell in our social and political contexts? Is the social study of cosmology always prior to a ‘science’ of cosmos?
Scientific Cosmology Helge Kragh (2007: 2) argues that while there exist such things as ‘social’ or ‘cultural’ cosmologies, encapsulating the study of ‘worldviews’, scientific cosmology is something quite distinct from such ‘social cosmologies’. For him, scientific cosmology, while it has a long history, was initiated more seriously only in the 1920s by the exploration, mathematically and then experimentally, of various solutions to Einstein’s field equations. Modern scientific cosmology is an extension of this tradition of thought: scientific modelling and testing of the nature of the cosmos and matter and energy in it. Of course, cosmology has long roots historically, both in the scattered as well as systematic efforts to understand the cosmos as a whole by early modern scientists, the rich astronomical data inherited from various star-gazing civilizations (from the Egyptian to the Chinese and the Mayan civilizations), and the rise of astrophysical discoveries and developments, especially in spectroscopic analysis of elements of the nineteenth century. And as a historian of science, Helge Kragh is well aware that it is human subjects that write scientific cosmology. He is also well aware of the speculative and philosophical nature of the subject matter; at many times in the past and even today, ‘belief’ in models or mathematic principles leads cosmologists to ignore ‘scientific’ experimentation on their models, or to assert them regardless of their testability. A long history of factual and postulated, empirical and theoretical, experimental and mathematical cosmological orientations characterize not only history of cosmology but also contemporary cosmological debate (Kragh, 2007: 184). And as a result the demarcation criteria for scientific cosmology as a science are not always clear-cut (see e.g. Kragh, 2012).
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What, then, makes a scientific cosmology as opposed to a non-scientific one? This very question has been at the heart of many ‘cosmological science’ debates, and is a question we turn to also with relational cosmology in hand in chapter 3. A few initial comments are necessary. Historians of cosmological science, such as Helge Kragh, study the human knowers of cosmological science in a historical context, revealing the dead-end paths of vortex theory and cosmophysics, as well as the obsessions with mathematics and the Romantic critiques of mathematical cosmologies. Intriguingly, many of these lines of debate are still arguably played out in the debates between string theorists and loop quantum gravity analysts or the cyclic models and the multiverse models (see chapter 2 here). The ‘human’ foibles and ‘social’ influences on cosmological scientists are powerfully recorded in the works of historians of science of cosmology. Even so, Kragh does not assume that these scientists—despite being drawn to particular cosmological ‘storylines’—do not also ‘get at’ something about ‘the cosmos’ (either instrumentally or realistically). Indeed, it is a crucial part of the story of scientific cosmology that it has arisen hand in hand with new technological capacities, new observations, and new conceptual leaps in how to study ‘the whole universe’. Indeed, cosmological science, hand in hand with astrophysics and astronomy, two sciences it is inextricably tied to, have seen a rapid, unprecedented rise of ‘new’ knowledge, predictive capacity, and also arguably understanding of cosmological developments. For example, we had no knowledge of what we call ‘galaxies’ a century ago but we now know that there are indeed many galaxies, many akin to the Milky Way, in the observable universe. They are formed through various historically unfolding processes of clumping of matter and coalescence of matter, processes which we can directly ‘observe in action’ (although unfolding very slowly). When just sixty years ago the dominant theories postulated a steady state universe, flat and stable, scientists now have concluded that galaxies are in fact receding from each other at an accelerating pace. Much evidence, from varied sources, supports this. Where universe was once mysteriously ‘layered’ in spheres we now consider the universe is ‘flat’, isotrophic, and homogenous. We have observed that it hosts a great deal of radiation, the most pervasive of which is the Cosmic Background Radiation. Scientists have concluded that this black body radiation must entail an explosive start, when opaque plasma was once homogenous, with only quantum fluctuations present, and they know that the present state of forces and matter emerged from the breaking of symmetries as the universe expanded and cooled. Astronomers and physicists have measured the strength of all the key forces in the universe, and we know what the key constants are which maintain the universe (proton mass, proton-neutron ratio, speed of light, gravitational constant). This allows us to ‘model’, remarkably accurately it would seem (modelling outcomes
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closely resemble the presently observable universe), evolutionary processes in the universe. We also know, since the 1918 observations on bending of light, that we should consider ourselves as inhabitants of Einstein’s relativistic universe where matter and energy are bound in spacetime. And it has been concluded that there is probably a great deal of dark matter and dark energy in the universe, structuring baryonic matter, although we do not know what they consist of. Scientists now ‘know’ many things—both on the basis of observational evidence, mathematical calculation and modelling, and theoretical and conceptual advances—that they did not about the universe just some hundred years ago, and a lot more than we did 400 years ago. While much contestation exists in physics and cosmology—as is discussed in the next chapter—scientific cosmologists also agree on a lot that they now ‘know’ which they did not just a hundred years ago. How do we understand this ‘progress’ in scientific knowledge about the cosmos? What is the significance of the scientific knowledge? Is a cosmological theory based on scientific observations, modelling, and testing equivalent to any religious cosmological framework? How does scientific cosmology relate to ‘socially inherited’ cosmologies? These are complex questions, and complete answers emerge via relational cosmology in the rest of the book; yet we must get our bearings as to how we address this question. My initial bearings arise from a scientific realist orientation to the nature of the subject, which allows us to take scientific cosmology seriously without jettisoning the role of ‘social’ determinants of scientific study of the cosmos.
Realist Philosophies of Science Scientific realism is a philosophy of science, which states that for the practice of science to be understandable, some kind of ‘realist’ assumptions must underpin the work of science; scientists have to or their practices have to presume that the objects which they study are real and exist ‘beyond’ or ‘outside’ thoughts about them (Psillos, 1999; Bhaskar, 1975; in IR Joseph and Wight, 2010; Wight, 2006; Kurki, 2008; Patomӓki, 2002). For scientific realists, science is the varied ‘probing’ of the ontology of the world, even as reality is not always ‘apparent’ to us but requires us to ‘abstract’ through concepts. Science then tries to get at the world, but necessarily does so through various conceptual as well as empirical methods. For scientific realists, because science is conceptual as well as empirical, it is also always historically and socially situated, that is, reflective of the social and political interests and structures which shape it (Sayer, 2000). And crucially, science for scientific realists is neither defined by a method or an epistemology: it is epistemologically opportunist while having its grounding in the ontologically ‘real’ nature of ‘reality’ (see e.g. Patomӓki, 2002).
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I propose here a scientific realist orientation to scientific cosmology, because scientific realism provides one philosophically consistent and persuasive way to orient to the relationship between ‘social’ and ‘scientific’ cosmologies. I also defend it because it is accepted by many of the key cosmologists I work here with, perhaps most notably Lee Smolin.³ What scientific realism entails is the recognition that there is (something we call) ‘a cosmos’ and that this is the ‘object of study’ of cosmology and physics. Yet, scientific realists also allow us to recognize that we may never fully know it, and certainly we do not have objective access to it. Nevertheless, there is a non-conceptual ‘reality’, which, as we will see, we are ‘of ’ and ‘in’ as we try to understand it. The key consequence of this notion is that, according to this view, the open processes of knowledge construction of science—being open to alternative hypotheses, being open about methods and results—are important in allowing the cosmos to ‘push’ on our knowledge, assumptions, beliefs, and concepts. Cosmological knowledge here then is by ‘humans’, conducted through ‘human language’, through our inherited ‘social’ concepts, but it is also ‘pushed at’ by the non-conceptual—in experiments, through undoing and redoing of concepts and through technical languages such as maths. We can and have not only thus gained better ‘control’ or subjectively more adequate beliefs of the cosmos but can say we have gained some ‘knowledge’, even if approximate and incomplete, of something we are of and in. This raises the spectre of there being ‘worse or better’ knowledge of the cosmos. As scientific realists are quick to point out, we may not at any given time have a very clear set of criteria as to what constitutes such better knowledge, but in principle we can hold on to the view that some accounts—evidentially, conceptually, or through a combination of each—are more persuasive than others in getting at the cosmos. Thus, cosmological theories and cosmological evidence today make a good case that our understanding of planetary nebulae as ‘other galaxies’ is in fact superior to the view that they are planetary bodies themselves. Equally, the theories of star formation, star life sequence, and star death are reasoned, with theory and evidence, from observations of stars, close and far, in different stages and provide arguably a consistent account of the observational evidence we have of the millions of stars we are now able to observe. To propose stars as embodiments of Gods of War and Love is less persuasive vis-à-vis observational and conceptual evidence, which is in part—although, note, only in part—why certain kinds of cosmological stories have waned. That is, our discourse on the cosmos is also ³ Even so, we should bear in mind that not all cosmologists are realists. The British cosmologists of the 1930s were explicitly subjectivists. Aligned to British subjectivist idealist philosopher Collingwood, Milne and Millikan for example developed explicitly rationalist subjectivist orientations to cosmology (see Kragh, 2007).
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constrained by our exploration of, or engagement with, the cosmos; not just our beliefs about it. Scientific realism provides us with an understanding of the possibility of the progress of science and its rationality as a pursuit. This is because it allows us to understand that ‘the images which we construct of the universe may live inside us, in conceptual space but they also describe more or less well the real world to which we belong’ (Rovelli, 2014: 66). As such there is nothing magical or otherworldly about science: indeed, as the scientific cosmologist Rovelli emphasizes: When we talk about the Big Bang or the fabric of space, what we are doing is not a continuation of the free and fantastic stories which humans have told nightly around campfires for hundreds of thousands of years. It is a continuation of something else: of the gaze of those same men in the first light of day looking at tracks left by antelope in the dust of the savannah—scrutinizing and deducting from the details of reality in order to pursue something which we can’t see directly but can follow the traces of. In the awareness that we can always be wrong and therefore ready at any moment to change direction if a new track appears; but also knowing that if we are good enough we will get it right and find what we are seeking. This is the nature of science. (Rovelli, 2014: 66–7)
We also develop our knowledge—or it changes as we probe the universe—and our ways of making sense of our observations shift. ‘We not only learn but we also learn to gradually change our conceptual framework and to adapt it to what we learn’ (Rovelli, 2014: 65–6). But how, then, should we understand the relationship between ‘social’ study of beliefs about the cosmos and ‘scientific’ study of cosmos?
Challenge: Thinking ‘Together’ Neither of [the] shortcuts—either taking scientific results entirely at face value or else ignoring them entirely—is fully acceptable today. Our cosmological ideas about the universe, and about the place of humanity within that universe, cannot simply ignore Science; instead they must surely be framed in terms that make the best possible sense when viewed in the light of our scientific results, without overextending the scientific concepts in question. We cannot afford to embrace the results of all the specialized scientific disciplines naively and uncritically; but neither can we dismiss them as completely irrelevant, in principle, to the whole cosmological project. Rather, we need to look for a middle way. (Toulmin, 1985: 11–12).
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Toulmin’s orientation is wise. My starting claim here also is that there is a close relationship between ‘social’ and ‘natural’ scientific knowledge and that a conversation between the two is essential for advance of each. On the one hand, social scientific studies can make physicists and cosmologists aware of the circulation of ideas and concepts through time but also through particular ideological traditions and eras. Such studies alert us to the influence of inherited conceptual storylines in scientific cosmologies. This is important in a context where cosmological science is conducted by socially (and politically) embedded scientists—not ETs or abstracted individuals. Kragh’s (2007: 199) study nicely records the role of religious, anti-religious, and other ideological commitments in rejection of whole orientations to cosmological science, and indeed to cosmology as a science as such: for example, the Communists in Russia and China banned Big Bang cosmology on account of its seeming religious underpinnings. And in much of Western cosmology, there are traces of, in part theological, in part colonial, imaginations of a ‘one’, ‘ordered’ cosmos with ‘universal’ laws which ‘we humans’ can control and leverage to master our environment, assumptions we will be taking on and challenging (ironically from within Western science) in the chapter to come. No account of the cosmos is ‘innocent’. We must then constantly ask: which social and political processes do scientific accounts refer to? What metaphorical structures or myths underpin them? As Patomӓki argues (2017: 11) we should promote ‘better understandings of [how] history and social dynamics could contribute to scientific developments’, not least because these may help scientists understand limitations of their conceptual systems and to push beyond, towards new conceptualizations. At the same time, humanists and social scientists must be aware of the pull of dangerous (and imperial) thought processes of a different kind: that social sciences can explain the stories, experiments, the observations, the logic, or the findings of cosmology and physics. This is, as I will argue in more detail later on in the book, a hubristic position to adopt: that the sciences can be subsumed under a ‘social’ science explanation. This position is not only arrogant but also ignores what physics can tell us about epistemology, ontology, and methodology (as developed here in chapters 4, 5, and 6). There is much more we share with physicists and cosmologists than we think, and there is also much more we can learn from them about how to theorize, use concepts, think, speculate, and converse. Indeed, rich new understandings of the social and political world can arise from engagement with physical thinking. One example of such productive thinking together is provided by Michael Foley (1990) in his Of Laws, Men and Machines: Foley shows how the foundations of the American constitutional system should be understood with reference to the Newtonian cosmological system, the principles on which it is built. The notion of checks and balances, physical cause and effect, ‘the mechanical tradition’, is ‘so deeply embedded in the processes of American
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political discourse that it is instinctively employed as a method of political conceptualization, as a scheme of political analysis, as a device for resolving political problems, and seen as a means of political evaluation’ (Foley, 1990: 3). Foley shows that the American founding fathers and the political culture take the ‘mechanical foundations’ of Newtonianism into their conception of the social and political life but also shows that this embedding also helps to embed the Newtonian conception of the universe as ‘self-sustaining and self-regulating’ in science. Physical cosmologies become political cosmologies; and political cosmologies maintain physical ones. There is not a neat, comfortable distance between them. The relational cosmology we develop here similarly ties an understanding of physical realities to our social and political worldviews. It suggests that we should not think apart but think together. We can converse with both ‘natural’ and ‘social’ scientists on the cosmos, at the same time, and when we do so rich new understandings of both social and political life and of cosmic life can emerge. This is ultimately why we should avoid both reductionisms: reduction of cosmology to ‘social’ beliefs and reduction of cosmos to physical science descriptions of it. We cannot ignore sciences as probings of the world, nor can we reduce explanations (of science or anything else) to physical science descriptions. Social and human relations cannot be ‘deduced’ from or reduced to physical theories or explanations and physical reality cannot be derived from social history. Both are tied up in a complex interplay: both constitute or negotiate with each other. The challenge in this conception for the social scientists is to avoid arrogance and also solipsism (social defines the social): social scientists should think out to ‘probe’ the world as scientists do. And the scientists should reflect on their own exposure to the ‘conceptualizations’ which surround them: physical theories are not given by God or the cold cosmos but are mediated in social and political settings. Scientific realism helps us to be reminded that we should also remain sceptical of the tendency to theorize science as Science. The critique of science by Smolin we turn to in later chapters shows that it is the glorification of science as a neutral Science, which has misled the physical sciences. We must then conceive of science as an open process of discovery and negotiation, not reducible to a Science of Laws. This view will be elaborated in chapter 3 as we explore Smolin’s challenge to classical views of Science. And, as we will see, this orientation concurs, intriguingly, with the lessons we learn from critical theorists, such as Latour’s (2007; 2010; 2017) explorations of science. For Latour, too, sciences are not Science but rather, sciences—that is, ways of being in the world, representing it. A science is of the ‘real’ but is also within it, not a ‘reflection’ of it from the outside. This is why scientists through their actions ‘make the world’ and also are political. There is no objective Science outside of the sciences: systematic and engaged ways of probing, conceptualizing, and changing the world by worldly beings of it, being confronted by it. This is partly why we should not expect the sciences to give us the
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truths but also why we should expect them to be involved, inextricably, in negotiations of ‘the social’ and the ‘political’.⁴
Conclusion This short chapter has sought to establish three key initial orientations, which we will build on in what follows. First, we have argued that cosmological assumptions are pervasive in how we think and act. We are called to think holistically about the universe both by theological dreams to know God’s laws and (not so distantly related) hopes to know the world through reason. We must be wary of the ‘unbridled cosmologizing’ (Toulmin, 1985: 9), but at the same time we seem pulled to ‘make sense of things as a whole’. To deal with cosmology is to acknowledge this seeming interest we have in ‘holding together’ the whole universe while at the same time recognizing the limits and dangers of doing so in specific ways. Second, it has been argued that to understand cosmology, we need to understand the differential orientations but also the close relationship between social and scientific cosmologies. We must avoid reducing one to the other, but also avoid treating them as entirely separable. As Toulmin (1985: 1–2) argues, in the study of cosmology we are surrounded with ‘mines and booby traps’ for ‘cosmology is a field in which we continually have to watch our steps.’ We must remain wary of cosmological arguments which have strong appeal to us and must mix critical knowledge of social and natural cosmologies in trying to grapple towards cosmological understanding insofar as it is possible (and there are limits to it, as we will see). Third, I have suggested that in this regard, scientific-realist framing of the sciences of cosmology and social science can help, for it allows us to see the significance of recognizing that science is in part about storytelling but is not reducible to storytelling (when conceived in a negative and abstracted sense). We tell stories of and in the world, and how we do so ‘matters’ for what stories we tell and how we matter the world through those stories. In thinking cosmologically we are in multiple binds, conceptually and in the world; this is why we can and should when thinking cosmologically ‘think together’. ‘Social’ and ‘natural’ studies of the cosmos, and ‘social’ and ‘natural’ ‘realms’ of the cosmos cohabit more closely than some of our historically inherited conceptual tropes allow us to recognize. ⁴ I am aware that reading Latour and scientific realism alongside each other is potentially controversial, given the critiques of flat ontology of Latour by scientific realists and ‘scientific realism’ by Latour (1999; 2010). Yet, translated through relational cosmology, I do not find these positions as ‘far apart’ as they appear in the literature and thus will not focus on constructing them as ‘enemies’. Critics are welcome to point to ‘inconsistencies’ of this position; which I have so far not perceived in this ‘thinking together’.
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2 Scientific Cosmologies It is striking that 10 years of radio astronomy have taught humans more about the creation and organization of the universe than a thousand years of religion and philosophy. (Davies quoted in Kragh, 2007: 250) For those who want to know the answers to the big questions about the natural world, the fundamental sciences whose role is to discover the answers to those questions are in a most puzzling of state. There is certainly reason to celebrate the greatest triumphs in the history of the physical sciences . . . .But just as the physical sciences celebrate their greatest triumphs, they face their greatest crisis. This crisis lies in our failure, despite what has been now many decades of effort by increasing numbers of scientists, to complete the scientific revolution that was initiated by Einstein’s discovery of the quantum nature of radiation and matter and his simultaneous invention of relativity theory. These two revolutions are each successful in its own domain, but remain unjoined. (Smolin in Unger and Smolin, 2015: 353) Fed by the observational findings of astronomical science, astrophysicists’ exploration of processes such as nuclear fusion, star formation, and galaxy clustering, and also by particle physics exploring the quantum, cosmological science has sought to ‘put together’ the macro picture the observational, experimental, and theoretical sciences have gathered. Today’s astronomical, astrophysical, and cosmological sciences have, within roughly a hundred years, transformed understandings of the cosmos and processes of matter and energy flow in it. As Davies above indicates some of the most puzzling questions about the universe have been resolved. At the same time, as the second quote above illustrates, scientific cosmology today is also in something of a crisis. Despite the increasing consensus on the great deal more we know, it is also riven by not only theoretical disagreements but also conceptual dead ends, specifically on the question of how to unify the small and the macro-scale findings of quantum physics and cosmology. These challenges themselves have brought about an increasing set of rifts in physics and cosmology over how ‘we should know’, what assumptions and methods we should deploy,
International Relations in a Relational Universe. Milja Kurki, Oxford University Press (2020). © Milja Kurki. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198850885.001.0001
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and what kind of a language we should use. Is mathematical theorizing the way forward or should experimental tests drive knowledge? How will we make the conceptual leaps required to unify the currently incompatible physical theories? This chapter introduces the reader to key developments in and core contemporary theories contending on these questions in scientific cosmology. I survey here scientific cosmology, necessarily in a somewhat general and rudimentary manner, to contextualize the discussion of relational cosmology that follows in the rest of the book. Indeed, relational cosmology is developed in reference to the debates surveyed here and thus we are better placed to understand both its orientations and the stakes involved in them if we appreciate some of the debates surrounding scientific cosmology in the past and today. Also, the chapter thus gives a reader a sense of what it means to do cosmological science. Scientific cosmology as we can see is not a pure Science: it is also inherently philosophical and speculative in nature and linked in complex ways to social, political, and ideological currents of thought. Yet, it is also an observational science and has resulted in significant shifts in ‘conceptions of the cosmos’ (Kragh, 2007). We will proceed here in three steps. First, we will briefly reflect on the history of scientific cosmology, especially in the last hundred years or so, so that the reader has an appreciation of the nature and the history of this (often misunderstood) field of physical theorizing. Then we will run through a selection of the core strands of cosmological theorizing today: their contributions, reasonings and puzzles. Finally, we will reflect briefly on the question of ‘crisis of physics’, which some physicists argue troubles the field today. It is this crisis of physics which the relational cosmology we explore here seeks to address.
Scientific Cosmology as an Emerging Science Scientific cosmology, as we observed in the previous chapter, has its origins in a series of important and long-running astronomical observations and cosmological mythologies. Yet, on the basis of observations of celestial movements and also on the basis of increasing understanding of chemistry, spectroscopy, nuclear physics, and advances in mathematics, cosmological science has made a number of important leaps in recent centuries, not least the leap to a more thoroughly ‘scientific’ discipline. Historians of science in particular Helge Kragh (2004; 2007; 2011a; 2011b; and 2015) have made important contributions to developing and synthesizing the story and contestations around these processes. Their work is helpful for us in multiple ways. First, they have been able to show that there are important continuities in cosmological frameworks pre-scientific and scientific. For example, the cyclical view of the cosmos making a come-back in scientific cosmology again today goes well back in human history. So do the central questions that drive scientific cosmology
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today, such as: ‘has the world always existed and will it end?’, ‘is the world finite or infinite?’, ‘is the world static or in a stage of evolution?’, and ‘where did matter originate?’ (Kragh, 2004: 2). These questions continue to be scientifically important but of course have been equally important to religion, hence the close relationship between religion and the science of cosmology.¹ Historians of science have also highlighted the continuity of ‘modern science’, including twentieth-century scientific cosmology, with Islamic and Christian theological systems of thought. If science is, as Whitehead once so powerfully put it, an ‘unconscious derivative from medieval theology’ (quoted in Hodgson, 2005: 32) then it should not surprise us that even today there are deeply held theological beliefs and assumptions in scientists’ work, even if often under the guise of secular thinking patterns. Indeed, science is not an ‘agent of inexorable secularization’ (Hedley in Harrison, 2010: 110). For example, we must remember that for ‘early modern scientists of the cosmos’, for Bacon, Descartes, and Newton, a belief in ‘order’ of the world and the role of God in maintaining it was essential. It was God who ‘installed’ the ‘laws of nature’ and maintained the ultimate order of the universe. And it was the role of man, made in a mirror of God, to come to know these laws. Newton disagreed with the mechanical vortex theory of Descartes and instead speculated that a force must be exerted on celestial bodies to keep them in their orbits. Yet, the law of gravitation, whatever its source (which Newton did not wish to speculate on) was made and maintained by the omnipotence of God. Equally thermodynamics and advances in chemistry and electro-magnetism in the nineteenth century, even as they were initiated by rather earthly industrial demands, also rarely veered far from religious framings. Was the universe headed to a heat death? Physical answers to such questions harked explicitly back to God: if entropy increases, there must have been a situation of higher entropy, thus the world must have a finite age, must have a beginning and thus the creator must be God (Kragh, 2004: 51). However, shifts of varied kind started taking place from the late eighteenth century onwards and the change in patterns of thought, while slow and incremental and by far from uncontested, was driven by observational advances; new optical probings of the universe. Indeed, the ‘scientific’ study of astrophysics and cosmology started advancing at a particularly fast pace from the late eighteenth century due to advances in optical and mathematical sciences. Herschell’s early discoveries in the spectra of light in the late eighteenth century allowed the first detailed study of stars and their composition.² These developments eventually gave rise to the first
¹ For a detailed discussion of science-religion relationship see excellent collection by Harrison (2010). ² The developments in observational astronomical science have always been a key driver of cosmological theorizing, even if cosmology is not reducible to astronomical science per se.
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categorization of stars, the Hertzsprung–Russell diagram, still used to day, and the very basis of our understanding of the life cycle of stars. New observations also arose from study of the Sun and ‘nebulae’. Observations were being made of new elements in the spectrum of the Sun leading to speculations on celestial chemistry. At the same time improvements in telescopes allowed resolution of individual stars in nebulae, raising expectations that they may in fact be other ‘island universes’ outside of the Milky Way. Yet, it was only from 1913 onwards that cosmological science started to take radical leaps and to raise its profile: speculations about nebulae outside of the Milky Way increased as first redshifts of stars, indicating their distance and movements vis-à-vis us here on Earth and each other, were identified. Yet, cosmic distance calculations were not nailed down until Hubble in 1923 finally spotted a Cepheid variable star in the Andromeda, allowing a distance measurement for this nebula to be made. These empirical advances went hand in hand with important theoretical developments: most notably the development of Einstein’s relativity theories, which came with significant, but calculable, cosmological implications with regard to the nature of ‘space’. Einstein did not understand these consequences himself, as he continued to argue for a fixed, stable universe (made possible by addition of lambda, the cosmological constant in his equations), but Georges Lemaitre and Alfred Friedman did, as both independently put forward an expanding universe solution to Einstein’s equations. Modelling of the curvature and expansion/contraction rate of the universe became a core constituent of the new cosmological science. The experimental verification of the early cosmological modelling came in 1929 as Hubble’s research confirmed what Hubble himself did not want to believe: the expansion of the universe (Silk, 2009: 10; see also Ferreira, 2014). Hubble’s law was able to confirm that the recession rate of galaxies is proportional to their distance, which meant that the universe must be expanding. Hubble’s studies also led to the discovery that nebulae were in fact not in our Galaxy but separate, distant, galaxies in their own right. The developments hand in hand of both quantum physics and nuclear physics then led to breakthroughs in understanding of stars in the 1930s, and then to advances in the analysis of feedback loops and matter and energy circulation in stars and galaxies. By the 1960s, astrophysical advances and advances in terrestrial geoscience had led to a radically altered understanding of the formation of planets in solar systems and also thus of our planet’s place in the wider cosmic developmental trajectories. Many contestations have characterized and continue to characterize cosmological science and astronomy. Cosmological science has gone through a complicated set of ideological, mythological, and empirical debates recorded powerfully by Kragh in particular (2007): from Babylonian astronomical mythology to
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Romantic philosophy-science seeking the ‘soul of nature’³, from vortex theories of the nineteenth century to the twentieth-century contestations between idealist ‘cosmophysics’, steady-state theories, cyclic theories, and multiverse theories. There is a contested social and political context to astronomical and cosmological discoveries too. Not only do the descriptions of the universe arise from social and political contexts, continuing legacies whilst also shifting language, but many of the twentieth-century advances in telescope observations arose from investment (often for political, Cold War reasons) in high-precision and longrange telescopes and expeditions as much as they arose from theoretical revolutions in conceptualizing space, time, forces, energy, and matter. The cosmological discoveries have political causes and contestations. Yet, despite being contested and tied up in political wranglings, cosmology also has become an experimental, observational, and a theoretical science, in that it has sought to make our beliefs about the universe vulnerable to the recalcitrance of the world around us to our beliefs. In so doing, in placing our ideas in the context of probings of the cosmos, crucially, advances in instrumentation and technical development have been essential for the view of the cosmos accumulated in the last hundred years. The knowledge so far gained has facilitated a radically altered understanding of the universe and our place in it. So can we summarize ‘what we now know about the cosmos’? On a certain level of generality a broad outline of ‘agreed’ upon scientific discovery and explanation can be provided, even as contestation over how to understand the discoveries remains (as we will see). If just over a hundred years ago we had little idea of other galaxies, or expansion of spacetime, astronomers now know roughly how many stars there are in our Galaxy, how many other galaxies there are in the observable universe, and how they evolve. Astrophysicists also agree on the basics of star formation and galactic processes and understand them to consist of certain self-regulating flows of energy and matter. They also understand planet formation and geological processes, not just on Earth but on other worlds fairly well. This is in part because hand in hand with improved knowledge of these processes has emerged also a better understanding of chemistry and the basic physics of elements and forces. Scientists still have little understanding of dark energy, dark matter or dark flow, and still struggle over the very early (before first trillionth of a second) Big Bang, what went before the Big Bang, and the exact geometry of spacetime, but the level of knowledge today, or the precision of the stories we can tell and visually model, is impressive. Not only do scientists have good models, they have some of the technology to test the models and hypotheses against the universe. ³ With striking resemblances to new materialism and even in some respects to relational cosmology.
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All of this information fits in, or develops out of, the one major strand of cosmological theorizing and observational cosmology today, although critics also exist and contend its validity. This cosmological theory is called the standard model and is also often equated with the notion of Big Bang model. This model is superbly well experimentally and theoretically backed up today (see below) and yet still unable to address some key issues. It is these weaknesses that the ‘alternative’ strands of theorizing try to take on today: perhaps most centrally the challenge of quantum gravity and the Planck scale in the early history of the universe’s development. Each model, standard or otherwise, it should be noted, is simultaneously a cosmological theory and a theory of the very small, theory of particles and quantum (or even sub-quantum) behaviour. One of the unique aspects of cosmology is that it has to address both observation and theorization of the very large-scale structure of the universe and the theorization and observation of the very small-scale structure of the universe. This is because in the Big Bang, or whatever we call the ‘origin’ of expansion of our observable universe, cosmologists know (and agree) that at the ‘beginning’ (or Big Bang, which for some also has historical origins) entailed the unification of the very big and the very small. It is from this picture we will proceed now to examine debates in scientific cosmology, debates which relational cosmology sits within in a particular way. While the above account and the delineation of key contestations below may seem ‘brash’ and one-sided to many readers from humanities and social sciences in particular—Is this not an account of Eurocentric science? Where is recognition of validity of non-Western or non-scientific cosmologies?—I hope the reader will bear with me, for in part it is my aim in what follows to show that even as this may indeed be the case the science as interpreted here also points in the direction of intriguing conversations on these very issues.
‘Newtonian’ Science and the Cosmos Before we survey current strands of thought, we must first understand the dominant cosmological model from which they emerge and which they overtake. This cosmological image—‘Newtonian cosmology’—is crucial for us, not because we—or any cosmologist today—will follow it, but because its assumptions are pervasive in social and political life. Newton’s groundbreaking science has had foundationally important consequences for the sciences for the last four hundred years and its principles, philosophical and conceptual, continue to be embedded in much of our social and political life even as they have been by and large surpassed in the physical and the cosmological sciences.
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In this section, I want to, first, give an account of the basic parameters of Newton’s Laws. This will remain a non-technical exposition focusing on the essential arguments and crucially their philosophical underpinnings and implications. Indeed, in what follows I will set out five key foundational philosophical assumptions/implications to arise out of Newtonian thinking. I will point to their importance and also their debated nature in physics and cosmology, partly because the disagreements with this paradigm and its conceptual foundations provide an important backdrop for relational cosmology and what it argues. Newton’s laws of motion are in many ways the most significant legacy of his multi-pronged scientific discoveries and arguments (e.g., on spectra, light, optics, chemistry). These laws attempted to, for the first time, put together a universal system of principles for explaining patterns on the planet and beyond it. This is important to note because Aristotelian cosmology, for example, had relied on the separation of different regions of the cosmos: each rung in his cosmological sphere, from earthly processes to star movements, was governed by different principles of motion. Newton, radically, suggested that the effects of gravity on the planet Earth were similar to effects of force on planetary bodies themselves. This notion that a unifying set of principles would govern across the cosmos was a radical break from the past. Newton’s first two laws of motion provide the key focal point for how to understand the world from a Newtonian perspective. They specify that 1) ‘every body perseveres in its state either of rest or of uniform motion in a straight line, except insofar as it is compelled to change its state by impressed forces’, and 2) that ‘the change in motion is proportional to the impressed motive force and is made along the straight line on which the force is impressed’ (Maudlin, 2012, 4, 19). These principles, motivated to explain motions, were premised on a Euclidian space (E³) which defined the topological and affine qualities of the geometric space. Indeed, Newton’s perhaps most significant discovery, or rather argument, pertained to the geometric qualities of physical argumentation. His laws famously assumed (and he was aware of this, arguing in part that he could only indirectly prove the validity of such assumptions) the ideas of absolute space and absolute time. Newton himself did not argue that these should have specific linear coordinates, but his laws of locomotion assumed that movement must be in relation to absolute space and time. This principle was subject to much debate at the time (see e.g. Clarke and Leibniz exchange, recorded in Maudlin 2012), and continues to be the central point of origin of ‘critiques’ of Newton’s cosmology. Yet, this system assumed much more than absoluteness of points of space and time (1). It also assumed, as Rovelli puts it, that ‘space was a great empty container,
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a large box which enclosed the universe’ (Rovelli, 2014: 5). This ‘space’ would be ‘the same’ everywhere, that is, it would have translational symmetry (be isotropic). Thus, each similar bit of space was exchangeable, rather than unique. This is a crucial assumption because it implies, in essence, that space is fixed and that it is ‘an empty’ background (2). Before God invented matter to fill it, for Newton, this space just existed as ‘empty space’ (Maudlin, 2012: 38). What this space is a background to, for Newton, is ‘things’ that move in it. Indeed, it is the locomotion of things in that space (3) that his laws were designed to allow us to understand. Whether apples, or planets, objects were to be observed ‘moving’ in space—and it is from the (paradoxically⁴) relative motion of these objects (and the forces on them) that we must work from as we try to understand the universe. These laws of motion were interesting in that they specified a mechanically consistent working of the universe (4). The universe, and ‘things’ in it, worked according to a hidden order exemplified in the laws expressed and the topology of the geometry defined. Furthermore, as specified above, this system of forces and movement were characterized by universality (5). Unlike Aristotle’s argument that there were distinct earthly and celestial movements, Newton’s laws were to be universal. And, crucially, these universal principles were to be discoverable by reason and observation. While we could not directly prove absolute space we could derive and should assume it from the relative motion of observable objects. Crucially, this was possible because ‘nature entailed permanent and objective principles’ (Foley, 1990: 12). This itself, made ‘Science’ possible. It is not a surprising finding that Newton’s theories were underpinned by deep theological motivations, not only with regard to the role of God as the maker and governor of the celestial system, but also in terms of the kinds of questions that were asked and unasked. Newton famously declined to ask why gravity causes the effects of ‘attraction’ his laws pointed to, precisely because asking such questions was not for him to do. Man’s role was to observe the qualities of movement and to use reason to decipher the laws of movement which God had willed. And the debates which followed, such as that between Leibniz and Clarke on absolute space, continued to revolve around the role of God in structuring the universe. Nevertheless, over some centuries, movement from the Newtonian system of thought took place, initially by recognition of the lack of necessity of the assumption of absolute space and time for (even) a Newtonian account of movement of objects in spacetime (for discussion of Galilean relativity see e.g. Maudlin’s [2012] excellent discussion). These assumptions were then finally purged from modern
⁴ Although Newton assumed absolute space, his objects were traced essentially moving relatively. See Maudlin, 2012.
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physics and cosmology—at least on an explicit level—with the formulation of special relativity and general relativity theories (see e.g. Ferreira, 2014 and Maudlin, 2012). Here ‘gravitational field is not diffused through space; the gravitational field is that space itself’ (Rovelli, 2014: 6). Following the general theory of relativity, no longer do physicists or cosmologists openly start from Newtonian assumptions in understanding space or gravity—even as using coordinate systems continues to be useful for solving certain engineering puzzles. As Smolin (1997: 31) puts it: ‘Newtonian physics is useful, even if it is not true, as an approximation that helps us to understand many different phenomena. But it is completely discredited as an answer to any fundamental questions about what the world is.’ But while seemingly now denounced, the Newtonian background assumptions continue to inform our vocabularies and thus scientific and crucially social practice in surprising ways. This is partly because they have become so deeply embedded in our conceptual systems that they appear as intuitive. As Margaret Wertheim (2011) so nicely illustrates, we have become ‘lost’ in Newtonian empty space. This is where we find ourselves, alone, moving, against fixed empty backgrounds. This is not all, for we also lost God in this empty space too: ‘in a physicalist picture of the world it has become increasingly difficult to argue for the reality of any kind of non-physical dimension to human existence’ (Wertheim, 2011: 77). New secular gods emerged, physical, real, moving in space: individuals and states, ‘real’, mappable, of this world, and yet inheritors of God’s legacies. As we will discuss in more detail in chapters to come much of our current political and social life, and much of IR theory, works with implicit assumptions of a Newtonian kind. For example, those scholars who tend to assume that IR is about tracking the actions of states or transnational actors, about tracing their actions and patterns in these actions, inhabit a Newtonian conceptual universe. Here things (individuals/states) move against backgrounds, making ‘patterns’, balancing each other. These movements are regular, and mechanically traceable, and thus tend to work with a Newtonian set of conceptual imaginaries. In political theory and IR liberalism and realism are particularly wedded to Newtonian imagery of things moving in empty space, with balances of forces and interactions characterizing political life (see also Allan, 2018 for a detailed account of Newtonian origins of balance of power and ‘development’). As Foley’s (1990) account of Newtonian influence on concrete political life (not just political theories) emphasized, our social and political assumptions, especially in the ‘West’, tend to be deeply embedded on Newtonian foundations, which themselves are embedded in a set of theological foundations. The rational order of the universe, the balance of forces, the mechanistic social systems based on laws, all gave promise not only to science but also social science, politics, and international politics.
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It is these assumptions that we need to be more ready to scrutinize for most of physical and cosmological thinking now points in the direction of quite different cosmological models. Let us examine these in detail, for it is in conversation with these models, not just the mostly antiquated but still socially and politically relevant Newtonian model, that the relational cosmologists develop their arguments.
Strands of Current Scientific Cosmology There are a number of cosmological strands of theorizing in play today. While they seem to their advocates ‘unique’, when examined in historical context, they also show striking similarities to historically reproduced structures of narratives of the cosmos: cyclic theories, mathematical theories, idealist theories, relational theories. Yet, it is crucial to note that these theories are not reducible to the mythological storylines but rather develop (in most cases) testable scientifically convergent and plausible analyses of the cosmos. Unlike in Greek or medieval debates on cosmology, then, these accounts are more 1) tentatively held and 2) are subject to proof and open scientific scrutiny. They are also developed, while in a social context, in the context of the recognition of the recalcitrance of the cosmos to our beliefs. This is why some cosmological stories—for example, some of the openly theological ones which draw reasoning purely from belief—are now discredited by most cosmologists, whatever strand of theorizing they come from and whatever the specific issues with other contemporary scientific models.
Standard Model: Big Bang, Inflationary Universe The dominant so-called standard model, which incorporates both the so-called standard model particle physics and the so-called standard model cosmology provides the central ground for cosmological and astrophysics thinking today. This is accepted even as most theorists and empirical researchers also know that this model is itself less than fully complete, not least because of its inability to square fully its picture of the big and the small (quantum theory of gravity). Yet, its story provides a central testing ground for most experimentation in the field and has been successful experimentally over the last some decades. Indeed, the standard model provides the basis not only of particle physics and scientific cosmology, but also the physical basis for theorizing chemical, biological and geophysical processes. Indeed, it is accepted as the ‘standard’ story against which much of the theorization in all natural sciences works in relation to.
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The standard model story goes like this: contrary to the steady-state theories of the universe, advocated by many cosmologists in the mid-twentieth century, the standard model works on the basis of the acceptance of the idea of the Big Bang. Einstein himself did not espouse this solution, but Georges Lemaitre and Alexander Friedman initially, and many others since the 1930s, came to see expansive solutions to Einstein’s field equations as the most evident way to model the universe (Ferreira, 2014). These models were proved plausible by the discovery by Hubble of the expansion of the universe. The challenge was how to explain this expansion. The constant expansion of the universe, it was suggested, can be traced back in time to a moment of complete ‘contraction’, that is a point at which matter and energy was infinitely dense, from which the ‘explosion’ of the Big Bang emerged. The smoothness, isotrophic, and homogenous nature of distribution of matter and energy in the universe, must have originated in this Big Bang. A key extension of Big Bang standard model is today the theory of inflation. This states that the only way to explain the homogeneity of the universe is through the existence of an inflationary field, which was responsible for a very rapid inflation of the cosmos in its very first moments. The energy for this inflation, it is surmised, emerged quite naturally from the phase transition that occurred as ‘symmetry’ between forces and matter broke. The chemical and physical forces emerged ‘because the force that holds atomic nuclei together is stronger and on a smaller scale than the force that holds atoms together’ (Silk, 2009: 30). This allows for atoms’ electrons to move around ‘nuclei’ generating ‘chemistry’. At some point this inflation receded, giving rise to the expanding but ‘flat’ universe we observe now.⁵ Evidence of inflation is predicted to be discoverable in the pattern of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation in the form of gravitation waves, although signs of such have not yet (despite some false alarms) been found. Even as inflation has not been ‘proven’ yet, there is little doubt that some variation of the Big Bang picture is broadly accurate as a description of the last 13.8 billion years of the universe’s history in our neighbourhood. Multiple forms of evidence exist for this Big Bang picture: not only does the homogeneity and isotrophic nature of the universe suggest it but also the existence of and the fluctuation distribution of the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation confirms it, as does the fast recession rate of galaxies. So does the dominance of light elements in the universe (these must have formed in the first processes of the universe). What the Big Bang model explains is the cooling of matter as it expands, and how gravitation comes to affect this cooling matter. Because smaller clumps cool ⁵ This flat universe is the most likely outcome according to Bayesian logic: most models of inflation ‘favour flatness’ (Silk, 2009: 39).
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faster, they form into clouds and give rise, through gravitational contraction, to stars. These in turn start experiencing clumping that leads to galaxies. Newton insisted that God unilaterally wills stars into being, which then move according to his laws (Silk, 2009: 53). Quite to the contrary, we now know that they emerge naturally from the physical and chemical elements formed earlier on in the universe. In terms of particle physics the standard model works on the basis of a very closely set out view of the particle zoo from which all reality that we know is made up. There are sixteen different elementary particles, which make up the atoms and electrons. These, with their various masses and spins, and through their force particles, create the atomic level of reality and everything beyond. It is the properties of these particles—or matter waves, as they are understood—that CERN and the Large Hadron Collider are probing. The next to final piece of the puzzle was resolved with the experimental discovery of the Higgs field and particle, which had been predicted by the standard model for some decades (for a popular account see for example Sample, 2010). The core aim of the Big Bang model is to explain how the universe emerged from the point of singularity, how different forces and matter particles were created in the process of cooling down that followed, and how this gives rise to the properties—physical and chemical—of the universe as we know it now, 13.8 billion years later. This model has a very clear and intricate picture of this process and can tell us and predict for us in detail how the universe has evolved. We can model, with remarkable accuracy, the current state of our observable universe from the principles and mathematical values we now have for key aspects of the standard model. Nevertheless, the standard model has two persistent problems or sets of questions, which trouble scientists working with it. First, the standard model has found it difficult to unite mathematically and theoretically relativity theories of gravity and the quantum world. There is no obvious complementarity between the images of the big and the small in the standard model image of the world, even though the findings of both demand a unification. As Rovelli and Vidotti (2014: 5) put it, a student in physics classes can justifiably claim that their teachers are confused or schizophrenic: while they can in morning classes on relativity theory argue for a smooth image of spacetime, in the afternoon they will rip this view to pieces by examination of the quantum foams and the quantized nature of spacetime. How gravity and quantum theory will be unified is the core challenge of physics today. It is this challenge which relational cosmology and Loop Quantum Gravity examined in chapter 3 seek to provide an answer to. Second, this model does not at present say a great deal about what existed before the Big Bang, where it emerged, why the laws of physics we have are the ones they are and what were the conditions for these laws and the Big Bang to
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emerge. Indeed, the Big Bang model has been curiously silent about the reasons for the finely tuned constants characteristic of our (part of the) universe. Much like with Newton, who on account of his deep religious belief refused to speculate on the causes of gravity, some physicists today fear to directly tackle the challenge: what caused the Big Bang, what was there before and what is the historical context for the so called Big Bang? It is these two problems that the ‘alternatives’ to standard model cosmology seek to directly take on. There are various such alternative models, with a variety of different strands of argumentation. The main alternatives include the so-called multiverse models and string theory, cyclic and evolutionary models, and the variable laws models. I will not be able to do justice to all current physical and cosmological theories here but I will seek to highlight here a number of key orientations to cosmological science. I do not do so to resolve which of them is right but rather to provide a key context to the relational cosmology developed in chapter 3. Let us start with the main challenger to classic standard model: multiverse theories.
Multiverse Models: Inflationary Multiverse, Quantum Multiverse A key set of theories which challenge the dominance of the standard model view today are the so-called multiverse models. In fact, some contend that these theories, today, are constitutive of the ‘mainstream’ of cosmological theorizing. Multiverse theories come in various flavours and permutations, but what unites them all is the belief that the world is characterized, not by a ‘single’ universe, but rather multiple universes. The postulation of multiple universes is deemed to explain important puzzles and mysteries about the physical world around us, even as it is accepted by many that it is difficult to find, at least currently, direct proof of the multiverse. One formulation of this theory is the so-called inflationary multiverse theory, or eternal inflation (or chaotic inflation). This theory argues that the inflationary field from which the inflation within our cosmos emerged is in fact part of a much wider setting, an ever-inflating (or perhaps only ‘locally’ inflating) field from within which ‘bubble universes’, like ours, are created. The theory postulates that within specific conditions in one area or region the process of inflation stops or slows down, which ‘creates’ the universe we see, ‘our’ universe. Beyond this, the wider universe keeps on inflating and bubble universes continue to be created. We cannot unfortunately reach these universes (via light) and for this reason this model is not directly testable. Yet, inflation itself is subject to tests and indeed many expect it to find proof in gravitational waves shortly. Other multiverse theories contend the argument differently: many of the most powerful forms of multiverse thinking today emerge from quantum physics.
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Quantum multiverse theories contend that the quantum nature of our reality is what ‘gives rise’ to multiple universes. As we, or atoms, ‘make choices’, that is, when wave functions collapse, the universe, it is argued ‘splits’. What happens here, happens here, in this universe, but for every possible alternative happening there is another universe ‘out there’, in the Hilbert space, where all the possible quantum universes ‘exist’. The so-called Everettian emergent multiverse model takes quantum mechanics literally (Wallace, 2012). For multiverse models there are then infinite amount of universes out there, including one, which is exactly like this one. Still, the possible universes any given region gives rise to is not infinite but finite: it is estimated that our cosmos for example has 10¹²⁰ bits and thus there can only be 2 x 10¹²⁰ alternative universes emerging from our cosmos. The multiverse theories have proved very popular in recent years. While they were once considered ‘crazy’, today they form the mainstream understanding within cosmology and certainly have provided excellent fodder for the popular science industry which propagates the multiverse picture of the universe with great power and wonder (see e.g. Greene, 2011).
String Theory A variation on the multiverse image is given rise to by an important, yet also, some argue, troubled, revolution in particle physics: the rise of string theory. This set of theories argues that at the fundamental level our world exists as vibrations of one-dimensional strings. The mathematics which leads to string theory is intricate but also powerful. Crucially, it predicts the massless particle, which has the properties of ‘graviton’, the particle associated with gravitation. This is why, even though the graviton has not been ‘found’, it is seen as a promising theory for the unification of large and small in a theory of quantum gravity. String theory also puts forward possible dark matter particles and predicts the existence of ½ spin fermions, neutralinos, which are among candidates for the particles which constitute dark matter. The multiverse and string theories are strong in having firm mathematical foundations. The maths from which they are derived, or in which strings ‘exist’, are complex but elegant, powerful, and, string theorists insist, beautiful. Yet the theory is also perplexing, not least because it comes in five different formulations, each of which can be captured by another form of theory, called M-theory. It is also perplexing because it requires the world to exist in eleven dimensions. It is argued that most of these dimensions are curled up in on themselves; yet for string theory to be true these dimensions must be very much ‘real’, and could one day be discovered, although experimentally this is, most accept, very difficult to achieve.
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Indeed, the string theories, while mathematically impressive, do less well in the ‘real world’, for not only is there scant physical evidence for many of these theories, but crucially, many of them are in fact ‘in principle’ untestable, unfalsifiable. This is what generates, for the critics, the ‘trouble with physics’ today discussed later (Smolin, 2008; see also Hossenfelder, 2018).
Ekpyrotic Model One quite distinct ‘cyclic’ universe image emerges from this very same string theory (although the model’s creators no longer require the string ‘way into it’). This is the so-called ekpyrotic model developed most famously by Steinhardt and Turok in 2002. It is based on and arises from the notion of branes arising from M-theory. In this image our universe exists on a ‘brane’, a kind of a sheet residing in 5-dimensional ‘bulk’. Within this higher dimensional ‘bulk’, ‘branes’ can collide, generating energy bursts such as the Big Bang. This model argues then that the collision of branes provided the energy for the Big Bang and inflation. As such, there is ‘as such’ no ‘singular point of infinite density’ (Kragh, 2011a: 202–3). The mechanism of the Big Bang then is differently explained to solve the flatness and horizon problems. In extending this model it is suggested that the branes collide again and again, ‘allowing an infinite number of past Big Bangs in a “cyclic” universe’ (Jones, Lambourne and Sergeant, 2015: 356). This is then perhaps on the grander scale a new ‘eternal’ laws model: a ‘new steady state theory’ (Kragh, 2011a: 204). Yet it explains important things: how, for example, bangs can shape the structure of the universe that follows, and thus why particular values are given to constants. It gives a history of ‘this’ phase in the universe and thus offers ‘greater explanatory power’ (Kragh, 2011a: 206) over models which do not ask questions about the ‘before’ and ‘after’ the Big Bang. It also makes predictions: the model has the advantage that it is testable, if negatively, in predicting that there will be no gravitational waves in the CMB as predicted by inflation.
Evolutionary Universe Along the lines of Steinhardt and Turok, but exploring different theorizations of the big and the small, is the so-called evolutionary variation of cyclic theory. This is associated with the work of Lee Smolin and Carlo Rovelli and is closely linked to what we will call relational cosmology and which will be explored in more detail in the next chapter. These cosmologists while initially sympathetic to string theories, came to vociferously critique the dominance of the many worlds and string theory
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cosmologies, which they saw as not only based on an unlikely theoretical exploration in terms of strings but also a far from self-evident set of cosmological speculations. They also share with Turok and Steinhardt an interest in the ‘before’ the Big Bang, explanation of constants in post-Big Bang universe. These theorists develop their ideas from an approach to quantum gravity, called loop quantum gravity, which is the ‘most well-developed’ (Kragh, 2011a: 209) competitor to string theory. This theory requires no higher dimensions or unobserved supersymmetries. It makes the claim that space is not continuous but ‘discrete’ at Planck scale. ‘Space’ quanta are ‘made of’ relational loops, or spin networks. This gives the origin to the relational orientation of this cosmology explored in the next chapter: space is relational in nature. Smolin (1997; 2000; 2008; 2014; Unger and Smolin, 2015) and others (see also Rovelli, 2014; 2016) are strongly of the view that wrong paths are being trodden on in physics, some that lead the subject out of the sphere of scientific inquiry altogether. Smolin develops this in great detail. For him, the fetishization of mathematics, the lack of philosophical inquiry into the nature of being and the (lack of a) relationship between theory and the world are crippling physics as a subject. There is in evidence a ‘flight from reality’ (Smolin, 2008) in physics, manifested in the explosion of many-worlds theories and string theories which cannot be tested. Partly in an attempt to address this crisis of physics, but also reflecting his alternative paths into cosmological science, Smolin has been developing a cosmological theory based explicitly on reality, causality, time-bound, and processual evolutionary model of the cosmos. This model, called in a recent book the ‘Singular Universe’ thesis, argues for a view in which we accept the i) reality of time, ii) universe as a singular causally unfolding (set of) process(es), iii) laws of nature as being ‘within’ the cosmos, not outside it in some Platonic or Godly external realm, and iv) evolutionary history of the universe that explains the laws of physics parameters we work with today. With Roberto Mangabeira Unger (Unger and Smolin, 2015), Smolin has recently been involved in developing not only this cosmology but also a new natural philosophy of studying the cosmos. This cosmology abandons fetishism of maths and focuses on the historical reality of the unfolding of the cosmos. It commits itself to an open-ended sceptical science, which requires, however, testable propositions to be developed. On this view there is no absolute beginning to the universe but rather universes emerge from singularities in blackholes and the history of the evolution of universes with blackholes is the key to the rise of specific type of constants in ‘our’ universe. It puts quantum theory to work to explain the ‘bounce’ of universes. It can explain inflation too, but does not require the inflation field of its properties, as expansion is a consequence of the discreteness of space. As such, ‘loop quantum cosmology offers a precise description of the entire evolution of
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the universe through an endless series of cycles, including the transition at the bouncing points’ (Kragh, 2011a: 210). We will not know fully the pre-Big Bang world, as some of the properties of the universe are lost in the bounce, but we can know the context within which we must know the universe, its bigger evolutionary context. Smolin’s work will be referred to again in this book. It is rich in terms of its insights as to the weaknesses of existing cosmological theories and develops clear predictions and tests for its image of black hole-forming selectivity in the history of the unfolding of relations in the universe. It is not ‘confirmed as the truth’ but unfazed by the possibility of falsification, for it explicitly states the need to think beyond currently ‘socially’ attractive but untestable theories and speculations, such as string theory. It is an explicit attempt to address the increasingly reported on displeasure with non-philosophical physics (for a wider discussion of this see Musser, 2010). And crucially, it opens up to thinking cosmologically with others outside of physics and becomes interested in social and political questions alongside scientific ones.
Changing Laws Model Einstein’s equivalence principle states that the laws of physics are the same everywhere. But not only has there been evidence to the contrary (Brookes, 2010), but there are some cosmological theories which specifically explore the possibility that the laws of physics are different in different regions of the cosmos, that they are variable. If Smolin and others extrapolate the changes in laws of physics over time, these theorists suggest we may be missing something because of ‘where we are’. One such model is MOND, Modified Newtonian Dynamics. It argues that modification of Newton’s laws in different regions of the universe account for the curious rotation dynamics in galaxies (previously accredited to dark matter). These modifications only take place with very small accelerations, which is why they cannot be observed in our solar system or close by but only on galaxy scales. Still, a full-scale cosmological model is yet to be constructed for MOND and various questions persist, such as the seeming ‘need’ for dark matter in galaxy clusters. Other speculations on changing laws of physics remain equally unverified. Paul Dirac was famously an advocate of a variation of the laws of nature arguments, and has been followed by others exploring variations in not only gravitational constants but also the so-called fine-structure constant.⁶ ⁶ In this context, in the context of discussion of constants, it is important to mention another important principle: the anthropic principle. The anthropic principle comes in two forms. The weak
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The key point to raise about these cosmologists is that while variations of laws of physics are not proven per se, many cosmologists are very open to this. This is not least because of the fundamental challenge this kind of cosmology raises which is summarized beautifully by Kragh (2011a: 169): ‘We may say that a fundamental constant, say elementary change, is defined by our ignorance of it—not of its value—but of its existence.’ The real questions are not ‘what are the values of constants?’ but ‘why do constants have the values they do and why do they exist?’. These cosmological interventions raise important questions for us to probe further. Even as we know the value of core constants—speed of light, Planck’s constant, gravitational constant, mass of electron, mass of proton, elementary charge, and cosmological constant (lambda)—and other vital related constants— strong coupling constant, fine-structure constant, weak coupling constant, gravitational coupling constant, electron-proton mass ratio, and neutron-proton mass difference ratio—where they arose from as they did, to take the values they did, is the core question to be tackled.
In Sum We can observe a range of theoretical perspectives from which we may approach the study of cosmology. Much is agreed between the models—if paradigmatic assumptions in the past related to circular motion and extent of the universe being the Milky Way, these days such paradigmatic assumptions include relativity theory and (despite its variegated developmental trajectory through the twentieth century) ‘some kind of Big Bang scenario’ (Kragh, 2007: 244). Yet, much also remains contested: not least the origins of the Big Bang and ‘ways of knowing’ which of the models is the most plausible. Indeed, important sets of controversies have arisen in physics recently over how we should know. This is what is often called the crisis of physics.
Crisis of Physics? Cosmology has been an incredibly successful science. It has pushed the boundaries of how we come at the world through its various relativistic permutations (all principle states, rather commonsensically, perhaps, that we experience the universe as we do because of where we are in it. That is, the universe is like it is for us where we are because the universe as it is is how it is where we are. The strong, more controversial, form states that we are in fact a necessary outcome of a cosmos, for us to be ‘the universe must be such as to admit the creation of observers within it at some stage’. This principle arises out of the fine-tuning issues: does fine-tuning of constants to allow for us in our universe demand these principles? It is unclear. There are some voices in defence of the anthropic principle but for others, for Smolin for example, the anthropic principle is a ‘just a scientific version of the old ‘God of the gaps’ argument’ (quoted in Kragh, 2011a: 246) and as such ‘an explicitly religious rather than a scientific idea’ (Kragh, 2011a: 247).
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cosmological theories tend to be relativistic, and cosmology itself was given rise to by the field equations of Einstein’s general relativity). Much is now known as Joseph Silk powerfully summarizes (2009, chapter 10). We can see 12.6 billion years back into the universe and can infer its age at 13.8 billion years. We know Earth is 4.6 billion years old and that the Milky Way is 10 billion years old. We know we exist in an expanding universe, that there can’t be endless galaxies in this universe (Olbers paradox), and that stars do not have an infinite age, but a range of ages. We know the basic dynamics of the Big Bang, inflation, and Cosmic Microwave Background. We know particle physics and the origins of elements and geology and life. We understand symmetry of forces and phase transitions. We understand the cooling and formation of matter and energy. We understand why the universe is large and why it is uniform and we understand the fluctuations and evolution of galaxies. We understand where our Sun is in a galaxy. We understand how light and energy travel. Even if we don’t know dark matter, and even if there have been various missteps in cosmology, Einstein’s cosmological constant or Hoyle’s steady-state theory, we know a fair deal! Yet much also remains debated. The debates between the standard model and its alternatives are intriguing. This is because they show the persistence of the problems in conceptualizing science when it comes to cosmology. Cosmology has always had a curious relationship between ‘empirical’ verification and theoretical speculation. While all physicists, Kragh (2011a: 2) argues, tend to agree that physics and cosmology especially are in part speculative in nature, just how speculative they should be is not an agreed upon matter. At the heart of cosmological debates in the past (around vortex theory of atoms or cosmophysics for example) was a debate about the relationship between mathematical deduction, philosophy, and science. Today, this relationship remains hotly contested. Many recent cosmologists and commentators on cosmology have raised the question of crisis of physics. This crisis is arguably (at least) two-fold. First, with the dominance of the string theory and multiverse orientations, there has been a call to return physics and cosmology back to ‘reality’ (Smolin, 2008; Hossenfelder, 2018). The ‘disappearance’ from the real world into spheres of mathematics, however aesthetically pleasing, is not, for all, considered a scientific way to go. If we have no way of proving or disproving theories, can we still call them scientific? And why do physicists find it easy to ‘invent’ new particles or worlds which we cannot find? Second, physicists are concerned about the ability of science to think through the implications of twentieth-century discoveries. The inability to bring together the quantum and the macroscales, and the inability to test new theories due to technological limitations, seem to present almost fundamental limits to physics. At the same time, the sociological orientations of physics themselves are challenged. Why, for example, does the idea that laws of nature must be aesthetically beautiful persist? Is this a legacy of religious belief in God who could only make
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‘beautiful’ simple laws and if so is it a limitation on our ability to think physics (Hossenfelder, 2018)? Can we understand nature with our current concepts? ‘The roots of the crisis in naturalism’, argues Smolin, ‘is its being wedded to the picture of the universe [as] a machine’ (Smolin in Unger and Smolin, 2015: 357). This book builds on these criticisms and goes along with the critiques of some of the multiverse and string theory frames—not because a scientific critique is developed (this is well beyond the scope of this book or the author’s expertise) but because from a social science perspective, taking account of philosophy of science and history of science, the influence of certain ‘social’ cosmologies can be identified in these strands of thought which raise questions about them. Relational cosmology as developed here draws on and argues for a reorientation of physics (as well as social science) away from a mathematical universe to a relationally grounded conception of the world. This shift, philosophical and conceptual as it is, allows for new lines of inquiry and orientation in physics as well as in the social sciences. Certainly, this orientation is not ‘the truth’—indeed, the situated knowledge perspective developed here reveals such a goal to be an illusory one, but it is a conceptual approximation to the world which, it is argued, is scientifically, philosophically, and social scientifically interesting. The aim here is not to develop this theory as the truth but as a good, interesting, productive way ahead, along a new avenue. Indeed, as we will see, it is not truths that we (as limited knowers) capture; yet, inevitably our theories are also developed from within something we are of. The analysis here suggests that on multiple lines, for multiple reasons—philosophical, scientific, and social theoretical—there are reasons to consider the relational cosmological interpretation, which has affinities with evolutionary theories of the universe. Indeed, what is striking about this line of cosmology, as developed by Smolin, is that it directly challenges natural scientists to deal with social world and vice versa. Smolin’s analysis of the crisis of physics as well as his cosmological propositions are taken as important provocations not only for physicists but all scientists, including social scientists and humanities scholars. It brings explicitly into dialogue philosophy, science, and social science, without, however, abandoning the important challenge of scientific probing of the ‘world out there’ (which, however, we immediately ‘inhabit’ and relate within). With it we can think together and think big.
Conclusion The aim of cosmology has been to ‘explain the world in terms of a single theoretical system’, an aim which ‘remains a dream’ (Kragh, 2011a: 1). And although for some time there has been scepticism of our ability to grasp the universe in anything but our ‘preferred world-view terms’—for some, even in
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the 1950s which cosmological model one went with was an ‘aesthetic and imaginative choice’ (Johnson quoted in Kragh, 2011a: 197)—important observations have been made and important theoretical conclusions have been reached which have pushed and pulled on our intuitions. We have a few new bits more of the cosmic story now, which has also resulted in new narratives around the cosmos. The storylines that have emerged present, crucially, quite a challenge to openly mythological or theological understandings of the universe and to Newtonian dreams. The cosmological sciences have presented us with storylines that have necessitated deeply changed perceptions—of the universe but also crucially of ‘us’ and our ‘local context’ in it. Far from confirming the biblical story of creation (even as the Big Bang originated from a religious scholar Lemaitre and seemed to many religious in nature!) the new stories, including of the Big Bang, seem to show that there is no need for God in most of the stories we can tell, even as the spectre of God’s laws hangs over the ways in which physicists conceptualize the cosmos. Astronomy, astrophysics, and cosmology have been very successful in revealing new processes in the cosmos to us. Yet, ‘speculation has always been an integral part of physical sciences’ (Kragh, 2011a: 2). Today, the uneasy relationship between experimentation and theoretical speculation has generated a crisis in physics, some argue. Many of the theories and principles of cosmological science today are ‘so’ speculative that they evade direct testing. How much is this a problem and why might it be a problem? As we turn to analysis of relational cosmology, we gain a sense of the importance of bringing ‘philosophy’, ‘social science’, and indeed ‘theology’ back into science in order for us to grasp, or differently grapple with, how we might think cosmologically and as such scientifically today. Even though the relational cosmology we turn to now holds a ‘partisan’ view in the debates in scientific cosmology, it starts and agrees with many of the basic findings of scientific cosmology today. It is how we ‘read’ them and their significance that it challenges.
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3 Relational Cosmology It will sometimes happen that no fundamental progress can be achieved in science without dissolving [the] marriage between the empirical residue and the philosophical gloss. Once the marriage is dissolved, it becomes possible to see the discoveries of science with new eyes. It is never possible, however, to do so without changing some of our beliefs about how nature works. (Unger and Smolin, 2015: xiv) So far we have studied the various meanings of cosmology and the various traditions of scientific cosmological thinking. This chapter focuses on the description and analysis of the core insights of relational cosmology, a strand of cosmological thinking expanded upon and developed further in the rest of this book. Relational cosmology is an orientation to scientific cosmology that is informed by latest theory development in theoretical physics of the very small and very large, but also a set of arguments from philosophy. Indeed, relational cosmologists have sought to provide new ways to understand empirical findings, through rethinking the philosophical underpinnings of scientific theories. They have recently explicitly sought to develop, if you like, a new ‘natural philosophy’¹ associated with the physical science they develop on the cosmos. Relational cosmology is a strand of scientific cosmology associated with and developed most sharply by Lee Smolin, in conjunction with other physicists such as Carlo Rovelli but also recently, interestingly, in conjunction with social theorists such as Roberto Mangabeira Unger. Smolin expresses the core principles of relational cosmology in a number of texts on physics and cosmology which we will focus on here: The Life of the Cosmos (1997), Three Roads to Quantum Gravity (2000), The Trouble with Physics (2008), and Time Reborn (2014) and more recently in the ‘magnum opus’ on natural philosophy arising from this way of looking at the world authored with Roberto Mangabeira Unger called Singular Universe (2015).
¹ Natural philosophy is not equivalent to philosophy of science. ‘The work of philosophy of science is to argue about the meaning, implications and assumptions of present or past scientific ideas. It offers a view of part of science, from outside or above it, not an intervention within science that seeks to criticize and redirect it . . . . The proximate subject matter of philosophy of science is science. The proximate subject matter of natural philosophy is nature.’ (Unger and Smolin, 2015: xvii)
International Relations in a Relational Universe. Milja Kurki, Oxford University Press (2020). © Milja Kurki. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198850885.001.0001
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Scientifically speaking, relational cosmology has a firm grounding in general relativity, and indeed seeks to push it to its logical conclusions. It also relies on a specific theory of quantum gravity, Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG). As a cosmological theory, it also has developed a specific set of answers to cosmology questions on the ‘laws of nature’ and origins of them, through the so-called evolutionary theory of the universe. We will cover these scientific bases here first, relatively briefly, although with enough detail to give us a sense of the ‘scientific reasons’ for relational cosmology to look for a ‘new way out’ of physical puzzles through conceptual and philosophical rethinking. We will then focus here our attention primarily on the philosophical and conceptual principles expressed by relational cosmology and which inform it. It is these philosophical and conceptual principles we develop in dialogue with critical social theory and IR in the latter part of the book. Relational cosmology, I argue, not only shifts how we understand the ‘cosmos’ and the role of physics but also moves beyond the ‘cosmological’ realm to address wider questions of philosophical orientation to the world and also, strikingly, issues of direct concern to social theory as well as other sciences. Indeed, what is intriguing about relational cosmology is that it results in a ‘radical’ rethinking of not only science but also of views on ourselves, history, and our processing in the world. In this chapter I will set out some of the core philosophical principles of relational cosmology: its natural philosophy, its view on relations, its conception of situated knowledge, its critique of mathematics and laws, and its ‘realist’ orientation. This account is primarily built on the work of Lee Smolin, for the sake of consistency. Many overlaps with the work of Carlo Rovelli appear both in science and the discourse around it but there are also some dissimilarities. As Patomӓki notes (2017: 5), Rovelli is somewhat ambiguous in his philosophical deliberations: he is drawn to relational and individualistic, realist and empiricist accounts all at once. Smolin has ‘gone further’, in my view, in developing a clear philosophical perspective, which we can build on and extend. However, the reader should note that I do not build on this perspective ‘faithfully’ but also challenge and redirect some his insights in light of relational social theory I draw on in chapters 4–6. This is in part made possible by that fact that relational cosmology strikingly ‘takes on’ the challenge of building of bridges to the social sciences: not only in terms of deploying aspects of ‘social analysis’ to explain why physics today fails to realize the relational revolution called for but also in explicating the implications for social and political life of thinking in these terms. Contestation is afoot here, not only regarding truths about the cosmos but also about the nature of science, and knowledge, and at the same time with respect to the principles underpinning democratic society and politics. Indeed, intriguingly and significantly for us, we will see that relational cosmology refuses to ‘fit in’ to the box of a ‘physical’ theory. Before we proceed, however, it is important at this point to emphasize the basis on which relational cosmology is ‘worked on’ here. As already suggested at the end
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of chapter 2, I want to argue that there are good scientific reasons to develop relational cosmology, but also that the arguments here proceed primarily from an investigation of the philosophical and conceptual productivity of this theoretical orientation, the way it allows us to reorient our conceptualization of the world. Philosophical moves developed here then do not simply ‘arise from’ or ‘reduce’ to the physical theories, although they were originally developed from a set of puzzles arising from physical theories. Relational cosmology here then, is not ‘the truth’ about the universe—indeed, it does not claim that it is—it is a perspective from which to perceive how, in the light of current scientific discoveries, we could reconceptualize the search for knowledge and meaning—in physical theories and beyond them. These ways of thinking are productive, as I will argue, for settling and redirecting social theoretical, and indeed IR theoretical, debates and this is why I develop them here. There are then important—and interrelated—scientific, philosophical and social theoretical reasons to think through this theoretical strand of thought. I wish to explicitly develop its insights into social and political sciences, not just because of its scientific and philosophical credentials, but also, and primarily, because it already speaks in such interesting direct ways to debates on relations and relationality in the social and political sciences, including IR.
Cosmological Arguments for Relational Cosmology In this section we will first examine the core ‘physics’ underpinnings of relational cosmology. These are intricately tied to the philosophical and conceptual moves made by Smolin and others, but should, for the purposes of exposition at least, be ‘raised’ to our attention for the reader to appreciate the physical science origins of this philosophical rethinking of how we conceptualize knowledge and the world around us.
Whole World Cosmology and the Singular Universe The core starting point for relational cosmology is that it explicitly seeks to develop a whole world cosmology and explore its implications for physics and other sciences. What does this mean? For Smolin there is an important revolution needed in physics and cosmology and that is to shift our perspective so that we can fully appreciate the nature of the ‘cosmological problem’: namely, that cosmology entails that we need to analyse the whole of the cosmos together, not simply parts of it. This is particularly important because, he argues, if we adopt this perspective we will realize that the cosmos unfolds as a whole and as such there are not, in fact, in any meaningful
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sense, ‘things’ in ‘parts’ of the cosmos. We will return to this central notion later. But let us explain how Smolin got to this. At the heart of the development of this orientation is a critique of the Newtonian physical system and its pervasive influence in physics. The legacy of Newton’s conception of physics on our conceptual systems and the structure of our thought, often rather implicit, works ‘against’ if you like, the knowledge that we ‘already’ have of quantum theory and relativity theory. The core problem with Newtonian orientation to physics, and language derived from it, is that it pushes us to analyse the universe ‘in parts’. As Smolin explains: Newtonian paradigm is ideally structured to be applied to small subsystems of the universe, which can be prepared in many copies . . . In these cases the configuration space corresponds to the operational fact that the experimenter has the freedom to prepare the system in any initial state C. In cosmology we do not have this freedom, both because there is only one system, with one history, and because we were not there at its origin to choose the initial conditions. So when we attempt to extend the Newtonian paradigm to the universe as a whole, we take it outside of the domain where its logic and structure tightly fit the experimental methodology. (Smolin in Unger and Smolin, 2015: 374)
Classically, and influentially, because of its nature as a theoretical paradigm which works on the basis of ‘configuration space’ assumption (space as ‘flat background’ with ‘coordinates’), the Newtonian view sees the cosmos as made up of ‘thing-like’ objects, particles, or planets, which move in configuration space and in so doing obey certain universal laws of motion, which humans, in specific conditions (specified by us), can come to codify. It is not a surprise then that this view is background-dependent, that is, it assumes a background within which parts move. Smolin’s worry is that this assumption still informs, or underpins, much of modern physics—even physics which claims to take heed of relativity theory and quantum theory (which, for him, undermine this belief ). Smolin’s worry is that the widespread belief that through careful study and theorizing of ‘things’ in ‘backgrounds’ sciences can give us access to the ‘fundamental laws’ of the universe is mistaken and misleading. It is noteworthy that there is a rather reductionist principle also embedded in this framework. Indeed, on this view all other sciences can, in the end, once we know enough, be reducible to physics in that ultimately it is physical laws that describe the processes that have arisen to concern biologists, chemists, social scientists, and so on (Smolin, 1997: 16). Physics emerges as the most ‘fundamental’ of sciences, even if, for division of labour reasons, it is reasonable to work on the basis of a selection of disciplines. What has been a nice surprise, according to the Newtonian view, is just how useful mathematics has proven in allowing us to know the laws of nature: mathematics
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gives us a glimpse of the ‘mathematical structure’ of the universe, many physicists, cosmologists, and even lay people believe (see e.g. Tegmark, 2014). This mathematical structure appears to us as ‘eternal’ and our role thus becomes to get at the world through the mathematical tools we have developed. According to such a perspective, as Maudlin (2012: 31) puts it: ‘modern physics has become . . . thoroughly arithmetised, . . . pervasively dependent on numbers introduced by means of co-ordinate systems’, so much so, he argues, that we cannot readily recognize the original (non-arithmetic) form of physical or cosmological argumentation. This obsession with the power of maths is, however, mistaken, Smolin suggests. It is mistaken at various levels, but fundamentally, because maths looks at ‘things’ in the universe as if we could look at them ‘from the outside’ and as if ‘things’ were moving against ‘a background’. Smolin suggests that even though worryingly many physicists treat their subject as if this sort of a perspective was possible, this view is denied if we think through the implications of cosmology as a problem field and if in so doing we also work through Einstein’s theory of relativity and quantum theory. Relational cosmology seeks then to build: 1) a relational cosmology that is a truly relativistic, ‘whole world’ cosmology, and does so by at the same time developing a specific 2) quantum theory, which sits with this relational view: loop quantum gravity.
Relational Cosmology: Core Principles The starting point of a relational cosmology is that the whole universe is causally closed in that: ‘chains of explanation and causation do not point back to entities outside the universe’ (Smolin in Unger and Smolin, 2015: 371). Crucially, when our knowledge of these causal chains comes to its limits, ‘chains of causation end due to our ignorance . . . but inside the universe’ (Smolin in Unger and Smolin, 2015: 372). ‘The universe’ here then is not ‘what we see’, or ‘our universe’, but rather an assumption that whatever the universe is (at the largest scales) it is a ‘whole’ in terms of history of interconnection. This includes the universe before the Big Bang as well as the universe beyond our horizon of visibility. We must try to hold the ‘whole’ in mind, rather than divide the universe into divisible things. Even ‘multiple universes’, on this view, then, are ‘in and of the universe’. What this orientation means is that relational cosmology denies the possibility that we should or can invoke laws, Gods, ‘external’ multiple universes, an ‘outside’ of the universe. As such it directly challenges the perceived tendency to do so in string theory and multiverse theories. Indeed, relational cosmology evolved from examination of string theory and specifically attacks scientific cosmologies that evoke ‘outsides’ to our universe. The singular universe assumption does not mean, however, that ‘we’ can have access to the whole universe, merely that we are in and of a ‘singular’ universe,
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however, ‘big’ or ‘expansive’ or multilayered it is and however isolated different ‘bits’ of it can be—physically and in terms of our capacity to know. The view that emerges from taking the singular universe, whole-world, cosmology seriously is that from it emerges a relational universe. In this relational image of the universe (which physicists, Smolin argues, have tried but failed, due to residual Newtonian legacies, to grapple with post-Einstein) we have to accept that the universe, the whole universe, including everything in it, is network of relationships evolving in time. As Smolin puts it: ‘There is no fixed, eternal frame of reference to define what may or may not exist. There is nothing beyond the world except what we see, no background to it except its particular history’ (Smolin, 2000: 20). The universe is what it has evolved to be and what is in it is what has so evolved within its relations, ‘historically’.² This perspective is very different to the Newtonian background-dependent view, which has tendencies to reductionism, explanation through reducing things to fundamental constituents. Relational cosmology proposes that relations are fundamental. Even the ‘properties of elementary particles rest fundamentally on their participation in a dynamical network of relationships that form the universe’ (Smolin in Unger and Smolin, 2015: 355). Although Unger and Smolin also accept the notion of relationally given intrinsic properties and thus avoid ‘pure’ relationalism (see Smolin in Unger and Smolin, 2015: 385–9), the central drive of relationalism here is to accept that: ‘events are distinguished by their relational properties and thus must be fundamentally unique . . . repeatable laws only arise on intermediate scales by coarse graining which forgets information that makes events unique’ (Smolin in Unger and Smolin, 2015: 391). We will return to these arguments later, but of significance for us here is that what relational cosmology is trying to achieve is a logical follow-through of a relativistic cosmology into a relational cosmology. This relational cosmology embodies what on Smolin’s view is called background independence, which is a view of the universe which is not dependent on there being a ‘background’ against which relations unfold. This contrasts with the Newtonian view where our theory ‘assumes that there exists a fixed, unchanging background that provides the ultimate answers to all questions about where and when’ (Smolin, 2000: 25).
Loop Quantum Gravity Quantum mechanics and experiments with particles have taught us that the world is a continuous, restless swarming of things; a
² The concept of history must of course be taken with a pinch of salt in that due to relativity effects time does not evolve, necessarily, in a linear, singular manner. For a detailed look at Smolin’s conception of time see Smolin (2014).
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continuous coming to light and disappearance of ephemeral entities. A set of vibrations, as in the switched-on hippy world of the 1960s. A world of happenings, not of things. (Rovelli, 2014: 31)
These arguments on background independence, crucially, apply to our theorization of space and time themselves. Space for relational cosmology is itself not a background, but part of the network of relationships in the universe. This is the core insight of Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG), which Smolin alongside Carlo Rovelli and others was involved in developing. LQG has as its aim the unification of the two incompatible theories of general relativity and quantum field theory. Currently, students of physics are taught ‘two totally different worlds. In the morning, spacetime is curved and everything is smooth and deterministic. In the afternoon, the world is formed by discrete quanta jumping over a flat spacetime, governed by global symmetries (Poincare) that the morning teacher has carefully explained not to be features of the world’ (Rovelli and Vidotto, 2014: 5). On the LQG view, which seeks to meld quantum physics with relativity theory, space is not smooth but also it cannot be a background for ‘things’ moving in the universe. Indeed, as Smolin emphasizes, LQG forces us to accept that: ‘[p]oints of space have no existence in themselves— the only meaning a point can have is as a name we give to a particular feature in the network of relationships between . . . sets of field lines’ (Smolin, 2000: 22). This approach has many innovative contributions to make and is seen as a promising alternative to string theory (Kragh, 2011a: 168) for LQG theorizes space to consist of ‘spin networks’. As Rovelli (2014: 40) explains: The idea is simple. General relativity has taught us that space is not an inert box but rather something dynamic: a kind of immense, mobile snail-shell in which we are contained—one which can be compressed and twisted. Quantum mechanics on the other hand has taught us that every field of this kind is ‘made of quanta’ and has a fine, granular structure. It immediately follows that physical space is also ‘made of quanta’.
Space then is not smooth, it consists of ‘quanta’, which are imagined or mathematically described as loops. These loops are crucially ‘linked to each other, forming a network of relations which weaves the texture of space, like rings of a finely woven immense chain mail’ (Rovelli, 2014: 41). Reality is made of these networked loops. Where are they, you ask? A key thing to note is that the answer to this question is: ‘Nowhere. They are not in a space because they are themselves the space . . . . Once again the world seems to be less about objects than about interactive relationships’ (Rovelli, 2014: 41). Indeed, in-themselves these loops are not anything. Loops are
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not ‘things’ but composed of ‘networks’ which give rise to space itself. Thus, even the most discrete ‘bit’ of space is, in fact, relational. The evolution on macro- and microscales of the universe is relational. Crucially, these networks of relations, which incorporate everything in the cosmos, evolve in time, which in Smolin’s relational cosmology—rather radically for today’s physics—is ‘real’ (Smolin, 2014; Unger and Smolin 2015). Time itself on the relational view of Smolin is a description of this evolution of relations where time is a measure of change: and in a relational world everything changes, ‘including change itself ’ (Unger and Smolin, 2015: ix). And both space and time are made in relationships that make up the universe.³ LQG also has implications for how we think through the consequences of quantum phenomena. Instead of deriving from quantum theory a view of the world, which emphasizes the multiplicity of different worlds, as multiverse theories do, what we end up with this view is a theory that emphasizes the multiplicity of interpretations, from different situated positions, in a single world. While we have various descriptions of states, by different observers, each of them is incomplete because no observer can see what the others see. All these interpretations, crucially, are within and of the universe, not ‘outside’ of it and its relationalities (see Smolin, 2000). In sum, in emphasizing the singularity and relationality of the universe, relational cosmology’s aspiration is to develop, both quantum theoretically and cosmologically, a more thoroughgoing ‘relationalism’ in order to ‘shake away’ the remaining shackles of the Newtonian world view.
Evolution of the Universe Another aspect of relational cosmology worth noting here is its ‘evolutionary’ approach to singularity of the universe. That is, relational cosmology explicitly seeks to develop a physical theory and a set of predictions with regard to the development, or evolution, of the universe. Smolin’s argument is that, instead of ‘assuming’ (as string theorists and multiverse theorists do) multiple worlds, we should assume there is just a singular universe but that it evolves over ‘time’. Our laws of nature, our constants of nature on this view are, for sure, ‘finely tuned’ but instead of ‘inventing’ worlds where different constants apply and deriving our unlikely finely-tuned universe from a statistical argument (that is, in a multiverse there must by probability be one universe like ours), Smolin argues we should
³ It is not necessary to insist on realness of time from LQG. However, even so, akin to Smolin, Rovelli too argues that ‘passage of time is internal to the world, is born in the world itself in the relationship between quantum events that comprise the world and are themselves the source of time’ (Rovelli, 2014: 42).
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study the history of the actual cosmos we are in and of, that is the evolutionary history of the cosmos. If we do so, he argues, we can come to understand why the particular ‘constants’ that our universe seems to be characterized by have evolved. ‘Change changes. It is not just the phenomena that change; so do the regularities: the laws, symmetries and supposed constants of nature’ (Unger in Unger and Smolin, 2015: 8). To explain this change should be our core task: to explain our unique fine-tuned universe, not to ‘file away’ constants (in an endless universe). There is, there must be, an evolutionary history to the laws and constants we observe, which it should be the core task of cosmology to understand, rendering cosmology in essence a ‘historical’ science. Smolin argues that if we approach the universe evolutionarily we can derive principles, which must govern evolution of such a universe as we observe. For example, for the universe to create our constants it must be a universe that is able to produce black holes. Smolin then, in Three Roads to Quantum Gravity (2000) explains how setting out a ‘fitness landscape’ within which our observable universe is likely to exist helps: this can explain why our constants are likely to be ‘reproduced’. In this theory, ‘mini-universes’ emerge evolutionarily from quantum effects in black holes, carrying but also adjusting ‘constants’ in different regions of the singular universe. Instead of ‘accepting’ the nature of our constants, if we actually try to explain them, we can develop an understanding of what the universe beyond what we can see may be like and why our part of it has developed as it has. Smolin suggests that our region of the universe is prone to creating black holes, but also life, for it is those parts of the universe where laws of physics are adjusted just right to the production of black holes that the kinds of structures we observe, stars and galaxies, also exist. Contrary to the anthropic principles and theories then Smolin suggests that it is the evolution of the cosmos over time through formation of universes in black holes (arising from previous epochs of the cosmos) that explains how our laws of physics, which facilitate life, emerge. The laws of physics do not exist ‘for us’ to observe them. Smolin develops a set of empirical tests for this theory: indeed, his commitment is precisely to theorizing which is experimentable, contrary to the ‘flight’ to mathematics typical of string theory and multiverse theories. Relational cosmology is not ‘straightforward’ to test but can be experimented on the basis of and falsified. For Smolin, possible tests for it include various predictions concerning properties and distribution of black holes (see Smolin, 1997: 382–90). Rovelli, on the other hand, counts as a proof of LQG any evidence of the ‘bouncing’ nature of the universe. ‘If the theory of loop quantum gravity is correct, matter cannot really have collapsed to an infinitesimal point, because infinitesimal points do not exist— only finite chunks of space’ (Rovelli, 2014: 44). We should find evidence for the explosion (bounce) of black holes from observations of high-energy cosmic rays.
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Philosophical Principles of Relational Cosmology If there are the ‘physical science’ reasons to develop relational cosmology, let us now focus on drawing out the core philosophical or conceptual arguments of this relationalism. Indeed, what is intriguing about relational cosmology is that its advocates have developed not only an account and a critique of theoretical and empirical advances in physics, but have in so doing simultaneously explored and developed certain philosophical, or natural philosophy, principles, deemed necessary for the physical knowledge to be understood. In this section I want to zoom in on five philosophical or conceptual principles one might consider central to relational cosmology. First, I want to discuss the role of philosophy being developed here. Then I will discuss the key, but challenging, principle of relationality followed by a consideration of the principle of situated knowledge. Having set these out, I will then focus in on the arguments on mathematics and laws and the question of realism.
The Crisis of Physics and Need for a New Natural Philosophy Smolin’s work was developed squarely within the physics and scientific cosmology context and for the purpose of coming up with a better physical theory. Yet, by 2015 Smolin had developed with Unger an explicit natural philosophy to underpin or to arise from his physical theory. Even though the attempt to take on a new natural philosophy only comes into fruition in 2015, this development, or a need for it, was arguably already implied in the earliest Smolin book Life of the Cosmos (1997). This is because Smolin perceives the attempts to develop a physical theory as dependent on our ability to think ‘philosophically’ as well as ‘scientifically’. Specifically, he argues, we need take on the a) implicit religious currents of thought, implicit theologies, in secular physics, but also b) the development of a new philosophical system within which we might be able to come ‘anew’ to physics findings and theories so as to be able to overcome the ‘dead ends’ which plague scientific cosmology. Indeed, the crisis of physics Smolin identifies is in large part to do with both a problematic set of tendencies of physicists to ‘escape’ from the ‘real’ world into the ‘abstract’ world of mathematics, but also their tendency as such to hark back to (God and his) laws rather than facing up to the study of the universe’s historical evolution. The problems of physics are philosophical and conceptual, not simply ‘empirical’. This is why Smolin turns to various philosophical resources to think himself out of the problems he is faced with in his physics theorizing. Leibniz’s thinking has clearly been influential on Smolin, a legacy he explicitly recognizes. Yet, there are multiple other sources and influences, not least Feyerabend (1975;
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2010 [1978]) in informing his open conception of science. While Smolin does not aim to be a philosopher as such, he certainly has tried to bring an awareness of philosophy into his physics. This is not least in his latest intervention with Roberto Mangabeira Unger in Singular Universe. This book is built around the claim that what we need in physics, and in society at large, is a new ‘natural philosophy’, a new way of interpreting philosophically the nature of the physical world and the physical findings we have acquired. Crucially, by natural philosophy these authors mean a new philosophical orientation emergent from and with science—not a ‘philosophy of science’! What follows is my exposition of what I believe to be the core constituents of this natural philosophy.
Thoroughgoing Relationality As ‘it says on the tin’, relations and relationality, and thinking through them, are central to relational cosmology. At the core of relational cosmology is an extension, if you will, of what it means to think relationally. Indeed, a relational revolution is perceived as the key to physics being able to overcome the ‘crisis’ it is facing due to the hidden legacies of Newtonian thinking. This relational view moreover, it is argued, has substantial consequences for our understandings of everything else in the Universe and also ‘us’ humans in it, for ‘one of the things that cannot exist outside the universe [and its relations] is ourselves’ (Smolin, 2000: 26). Central to this view is understanding the universe as bound together, through networks of relations which bring it into being, and through which it unfolds. We should then not attempt to ‘break apart’ from the universe or to ‘jump outside of the universe’. We should avoid the attractions of thinking up imaginary alternative universes, Gods outside the universe, or laws existing outside of the relations of the universe. The nature of the world is what it is in its dynamic evolution through relations relating over time in novel ways. This means there is no ‘outside’ and that the theological move to ‘remove’ the ‘laws of nature’ or ‘ourselves’ from the universe cannot work. It is not possible to think in these terms anymore. This view means that all systems, even seemingly self-standing systems, are not ‘isolated’ or ‘autonomous’ (or even autopoietic, see discussion in ch. 5), but always ‘open’ to relational connections in the ‘whole’ universe. This complicates our analysis of ‘what matters’. As Smolin puts it (1997: 278): ‘the problem is that any relational description is necessarily complicated, because to tell where something is relationally one must bring the rest of the universe in the picture’. Contrary to the inclination to ‘break apart’ and ‘isolate parts’ (which Newtonian cosmology encourages), we should try to embed in and relate to the universe of relations we study.
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Relations on this view are fundamental then, and there is nothing outside of the relations of the universe and our relationality within it. It is inquiry into these relations and how they work, fit together, give rise to novelty over time, that concerns cosmology, but also other sciences: biology, chemistry, geophysics, ecology, history, and social science. Sciences study the evolution of ‘novel’ forms of relations, which have historically emerged from the relational processes in the cosmos. As such the subjects of these sciences are not reducible to physical laws, but neither are they ‘higher’ level sciences separable or independent of the kinds of relations other sciences study. All of science is then an interrelated study of relations. This means that the study of life itself is a ‘cosmological’ question, not a simply biological one for ‘one of the things to be explained is why the whole universe from largest scales down to the smallest scales produces a context that is friendly for life’ (Unger and Smolin, 2015: 398). Relational thinking has important consequences, for our views of sciences and of objects of study ‘out there’. One crucial, rather fundamental consequence of relationalism is the breaking apart of our usual language with regard to the world around us, language derived from a Newtonian universe. Relational cosmology in emphasizing relations challenges the idea of ‘things’. In other words it is a way of thinking through relationalism over substantialism, as Jackson and Nexon (1999) might put it. Instead of thinking in terms of things we really should think in other terms, preferably the language of processes. The universe, its physical, chemical, biological, and human, relations have evolved in time through processing of new forms of relations arising from relations relating in new ways. In such a world, a world where there are no ‘backgrounds’ in which ontologically thing-like objects move, there are, really, no such things as things either. All there is are processes. All seemingly thing-like ‘objects’—mountains, planets, or can-openers—are in fact processes, in the process of processing relations. This also means that in the universe everything is in the process of becoming. Nothing ‘exists’ really but is in the process of becoming (Unger and Smolin, 2015: xiv). The problem of the Newtonian view of science is that it: gives rise to the illusion that the world is comprised of objects . . . change would be nothing but alteration in how something is. But relativity and quantum theory each tell us this is not how the world is. They tell us—no, scream at us—that our world is a history of processes. Motion and change are primary. Nothing is, except in a very approximate and temporary sense. How something is, or what its state is, is an illusion. (Smolin, 2000: 53, original italics)
All of the universe is in process and different relations simply evolve at different timescales not evident to us due to the privileged timescales we tend to use given the kind of relations we are in and of, and aware of. Thus, every ‘thing’ in the
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world is really a set of processes: there aren’t ‘objects’ and ‘processes’ but simply processes, fast and slow. It is because of this processual nature of relations in time that we also need a particular kind of knowledge, or we need to understand something fundamental about the kind of knowledge we can have of relations we are in: it is always, necessarily partial and situated.
Situated Historical Knowledge What Smolin argues is that if we are in the whole universe of evolving relations, we cannot ‘remove’ ourselves from the universe’s moving relations: we are embedded in them. If ‘cosmologists are part of the system they are studying’ (2000: 27), what follows? One thing that follows is a breakdown of classical logic whereby we can have only yes and no answers, truths and falsities. In a relational world we also have ‘can’t knows’, and crucially what we can know depends always ‘to some extent on the relationships between ourselves and the object of the statement’ (Smolin, 2000: 29). All our knowledge in the cosmos, in all physical and natural sciences, as well as in the social sciences (where, Smolin recognizes, this fact has already been better appreciated) is ‘observer-dependent’. Given the limitations of our knowing horizons—socially and cosmologically—we also ‘almost always reason with incomplete information’ (Smolin, 2000: 31). We are in relations but have no privileged access to a God’s eye view of the relations we are in. We know the world from our relations and thus are always limited by the perspective, the situated knowledge, we come to know relations from. Smolin is struck by the importance of cosmology and social science in developing this fundamental insight about the nature of knowledge. While he is not aware of people who have used the topos theory (that he draws on) he argues that in the social sciences and humanities it is: no surprise if cosmology and social theory point in the same direction. They are the two sciences that cannot be formulated sensibly unless we build into their foundations the simple fact that all possible observers are inside the systems they study. (Smolin, 2000: 32)
Cosmology and social science have both brought it home to us that in the cosmos the only kind of knowledge we can have is situated, observer-dependent knowledge because we always know the world from within the relations that we are in. This has important consequences for physicists and natural scientists who have failed to admit this or to work with this ‘limitation’ characteristic of our knowledge.
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The crucial consequence of the situated knowledge view developed here is the realization of the importance of the study of history of the evolution of the universe and our role in it. Instead of assuming a background-dependent flatness and eternity, which we can synchronically model through ‘snapshots’ which we can manipulate through mathematics, what we should do is realize that ‘cosmology must be a historical science if it is to be a science at all’ (Unger and Smolin, 2015: xv). This is where the view of the world of the social scientist can help physicists! For life sciences and human sciences the view that their objects are ‘eternal’ has never fully held sway. In social sciences and humanities scholars accept that regularities ‘evolve together with the phenomena they govern’ (Unger and Smolin, 2015: xv). Unger and Smolin argue that instead of being ‘precarious’ in their scienticity, these sciences provide the way forward for physics and cosmology today in the view of the challenge of science they provide us: analysis of history of evolution of phenomena. Indeed, science in this perspective is not defined by a ‘method’. In fact, ‘there is no scientific method, science is fundamentally defined as a collection of ethical communities, each organized around a particular subject’ (Smolin in Unger and Smolin, 2015: 363). The reason this is important is that the historical understanding of the universe also gives us a sense of the role of novelty and innovation in the universe: relations in the universe evolve through ‘re-relating’ historically. Novelty emerges from this evolution: ‘the new is not simply a possible state of affairs, prefigured by eternal laws of nature . . . the new represents a change in the workings of nature’ (Unger and Smolin, 2015: xvi). We must understand how the new and the novel arise historically from the history of new relations. To understand the depth of this challenge, let us discuss the challenge of this perspective for thinking on maths and laws, some of the key notions of classical physics.
Maths One key consequence is that we must understand the issue of mathematics differently from how it is embraced by most physicists. Smolin and Unger hone in on this in the Singular Universe. The problem with mathematics, for them, is that it ‘empties’ the world out of its particularity and temporality (Unger in Unger and Smolin, 2015: 302). The paradox is that this is exactly why maths is both helpful and misleading in understanding the world. The world is not mathematics and mathematics is not the world: the world is not a ‘separate, nature-transcending realm of mathematical truths’; indeed, ‘[t]here is no such realm’ (Unger in Unger and Smolin, 2015: 303). Instead, the very reason mathematics is useful is that it reduces to skeletal
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structure the particularity of a relational world. Mathematics ‘does address the natural world. However it does so with the forceful selectivity of a form of reasoning that has no truck with the particularity and the temporality marking all nature’ (Unger in Unger and Smolin, 2015: 307). This means that there is a real danger in physics especially, but also in other sciences, of mathematics becoming confused with the ‘real’. We must not mistake an attempt to model connections, even temporal connections, in nontemporal ways. The subject matter of mathematics is the visionary simulacrum of the one real world. Unlike the real thing, the simulacrum is shadowy and timeless. It is preserved against corruption and change only because it is removed from nature in which time and particularity rule. (Unger in Unger and Smolin 2015: 310)
While mathematics can be very useful in helping us think through complex relations, we must avoid the temptation to ‘use mathematical analysis and logical reasoning as pretexts for an ontology of mathematical objects’ (Unger in Unger and Smolin, 2015: 311) and find a language other than that of mathematics to describe the processes in the world. Crucially, ‘we are not entitled to expect either that any given piece of mathematics will be scientifically useful or that any given scientific discovery will be best represented in mathematical language’ (Unger in Unger and Smolin, 2015: 328) for the universe’s relational processes are causal, and involve transformations over time. There is, as Sabine Hossenfelder (2018) has so powerfully illustrated, a strange aesthetic attraction to maths and beauty in physics; but blind commitment to this may actually lead us away from the world and good science. For why should laws of physics be mathematical and why should they be beautiful? Indeed, would anybody care for laws of nature if they weren’t beautiful (Hossenfelder, 2018)? How does one capture relational processes, then, for relational cosmologists? Interestingly, akin to methods of social and human sciences: through the use of history, through telling stories of the historical development of relations. The kinds of mathematical interpretation we have of relativity theory and cosmological evolution are best captured through stories about the evolution of relations. Maths may be useful and ‘many regularities in nature can be modeled by mathematical theories. But not every property of nature has a mirror in mathematics’ (Smolin, 2014: 249). This is in part because nature is dynamic and processual. Indeed, relativity theory entails that ‘the causal structure of events can itself be influenced by [ . . . ] events. The causal structure is not fixed for all time. It is dynamic, it evolves’ (Smolin, 2000: 59). It is for this reason that: [T]he universe cannot be counted. The most important fact about it is that it is what it is and not something else . . . [e]very feature of the universe, including
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laws of nature, has to do with the history of the universe and forms part of this history. Cosmology must be both historical and a science. (Unger in Unger and Smolin, 2015: 342)
Laws But what then are the ‘laws of nature’ in this frame? Smolin accepts that there are some general principles we can decipher in the evolution of the universe, and it is these principles that physics tries to get at. Yet, any principles themselves are evolved from the universe and its relations with itself over time and thus do not exist ‘outside’ of the cosmos. This implies that laws too are evolutionary in the unfolding of relations in the universe. Laws of nature are not outside the cosmos but must have evolved as part of its unfolding, the processes of relating of relations. Indeed, we now know that the regularities and constants we observe, the ‘laws of nature’, are not in fact applicable beyond the Planck time during which different laws or principles must have governed relations. Laws of nature are dynamic, evolving with the universe, not statically ‘in it’ or ‘outside’ it. Not only are laws then, as part of the processing of the universe, changing over time but also they are, more fundamentally, descriptions of changes changing over time. As Smolin in Unger and Smolin (2015: 356) puts it: ‘If the laws are timeless, they cannot themselves be aspects of the developing networks of relations.’ And if there is nothing outside of the relations these laws are also subject to time, a measure of change in the universe. This relational view, he accepts, is not an easy one to express or to fully grasp because: ‘It is not easy to find the right language to use to talk about the world if one really believes that the notion of reality depends on the context of the person who does the talking’ (Smolin, 2000: 46). Yet, an image emerges from this view, which is quite distinct. It is not one of a universe of accidental development of life from abstract laws but rather an image of a universe with processes, causality, relations, complexity, and time. Crucially, in this universe ‘self ’-regulating⁴ processes are central. In the relational universe, creation and recreation take place through and by the causal relations between relational unfoldings in the universe. It is by definition a universe in which relations in the cosmos interact (or rather intra-act, as Barad [2007] would have it) and in so doing create forms of complexity and organization,
⁴ We return to this issue of self-regulation in chapter 5. While Smolin argues self-organization is essential to a relational universe, in this book I develop, with the help of Haraway, the idea of sympoiesis as a way of, more effectively, extending away from ‘thing-ontology’.
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structure, which gives rise to chemistry, stars, life. We will explore this view in conjunction with relational cosmology in later chapters. For now, we can conclude by saying that relational cosmology seeks to shift our perspective, our experience, our relationality. It argues, as Smolin puts it in the Life of the Cosmos that: we are beginning to see evidence of an alternative view. In this view it becomes possible to imagine that a great deal of the order and regularity we find in the physical world might have arisen just as the beauty of living world came to be: through a process of self-organisation. (Smolin, 1997: 20)
Biology, it is noted, came to this view and abandoned its view of species as eternal some decades ago. Social scientists and humanists have for a long time critiqued analysis of the world in terms of ‘essences’. What Smolin is proposing is the same shift in physics (Smolin, 1997: 20).
‘Realist’ Philosophical Orientation? One final thing to note about Smolin’s view is that, while not directly discussing its ‘philosophy of science’ orientations, it seems firmly in line with a scientifically realist view, if not a specific strand of scientific realism such as critical realism. For example, Smolin is critical of those theories which are in principle untestable versions of many-worlds interpretation and string theory. Also, he is fundamentally opposed to theorizing which extrapolates away from ‘this universe’ to imaginary parallel universes or otherwise. This is problematic, fundamentally, because of Smolin’s view that creation of such views is religious: about harking back to saving ‘laws’, mathematics, and thus a God’s eye view over studying the real universe we are in. In Trouble with Physics (2008) in particular, he developed his vision of science: open, speculative, but realist. This view of science does not prioritize ‘method’ but innovation, openness, exploration; and yet, it asks theories to subject themselves to the reality principle in so far as they should try and work out testable hypothesis that can be examined in the world. Many-worlds interpretations fail this test, which is why the conception of science is actually foundational to the critique developed of them substantively. This comes to have some relevance to the arguments developed in this book—not because we need to ground arguments in realist philosophy but because a realist conception of science clarifies some crucial differences between different forms of relational thinking, about society and indeed science. We will return to this subject in chapters 5 and 6. But what are the implications, if any, of Smolin’s cosmology for thinking about ‘social’ and ‘political’ science?
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Relational Cosmology and Social Science: Initial Provocations While Smolin is a physicist and a cosmologist, and did not intend to develop a theory of the social world or an ethical school of thought, he is acutely aware of the interesting intersections between physics, cosmology, and social and political life. Thus, he not only calls for an integration, a coming together, of social science and natural sciences but also, boldly, goes on to speculate on some general implications of this cosmology for social and political life. He does so most evidently in the epilogues to Time Reborn and the Life of the Cosmos and in Singular Universe puts relational cosmology in direct contact with the philosophy and social theory of Roberto Mangabeira Unger. At the heart of Smolin’s (and Unger’s) intervention in how we think society are I argue here two suggestions or emphases. 1. He emphasizes the social and political nature and implications of science, including its importance as a form of democracy. 2. He stresses the need to appreciate society and the cosmos as open systems and the importance of appreciating and augmenting the shift already taking place to a society beyond Newton and Locke, a society without absolutes, a world open to novelty and creation by those in its relations. These are worth consideration here for later on in this book I develop arguments broadly in line with these orientations, although it should also be noted that I extend these insights in somewhat more radically relational directions (in particular via critical and posthumanism) not explicitly considered by Smolin.
Science, in Society In Life of the Cosmos Smolin expounds his view of the scientists: they are not detached, they are part of the world, social and otherwise, which influences how they know. Recognizing this is important not only to realize the difficulties of knowing in a situated universe but also because this is why the processes of science really matter. For Smolin science is part of the negotiation of what the world looks like and science as such is part of societal and political processes. This is why Smolin believes that in the process of ‘forging a community out of humanity’ (1997: 368) we have to come up with some answers in cosmology as well as art and politics. And the kind of worldview we espouse through our scientific language and orientation is deeply influential, he recognizes, on society as well as being reflective of it. Indeed, he remarks that the view of the universe of Descartes and Newton:
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resembled to a remarkable degree the ideal society as envisioned by Locke and Hobbes. Atoms moving individually, their properties defined by their relation to a fixed and absolute structure that is identified with God, interacting via absolute and immutable laws that apply to all equally. (1997: 368)
And it is not an accident that the Aristotelian view of the Middle Ages reflected the hierarchical view, with different levels and laws, all connected to a prime mover (Smolin, 1997: 368). ‘Cosmology mattered then’, he argues, and ‘continues to matter, even as both it and society transform themselves in unimaginable ways’ (Smolin, 1997: 368–9). Cosmology, in other words, is part of the process of negotiating societal relations, forms of life, politics, and ethics. The reason cosmology matters ultimately, then, is not because it is the ‘most foundational’ of sciences but because it has deep, significant, and often ignored social and political consequences. These consequences, crucially, make demands also on the social sciences. Indeed, cosmological thinking is echoed in social scientific thinking: or as he claims, the ‘conceptual steps in physical sciences have been echoed in social science’ (Smolin, 2014: 263). In Newton’s and Locke’s era, the birth time of liberalism and realism, [the] notion that the ‘position of particles were defined with respect not to each other but to absolute space was mirrored in the notion of rights defined for each citizen with respect to an unchanging absolute background of the principle of justice’ (Smolin, 2014: 263–4). It is not a great surprise then that Smolin wonders: ‘General relativity moved physics to a relational theory of space and time, in which all properties are defined in terms of relationships. Is this mirrored in an analoguous movement in the social theory? I believe it is.’ (Smolin, 2014: 264–5). He goes on to specify Roberto Mangabeira Unger’s theories as examples of social theories with striking similarities where the future is open and novel modes of existence and organization are possible. This book will develop some more, and slightly different connections. Whatever Smolin would make of the connections we develop here, he is likely to be attentive to the drive which motivates this project: social and natural science must seek a reconciliation for they are closely entangled, conceptually, empirically, and politically. Even so, Smolin emphasizes that science is not ‘freely invented by us’ or simply about consensus among scientists. ‘I believe in nature, its dominance over us and in its recalcitrance to our fantasies and schemes’ (Smolin, 1997: 369). Indeed, he warns against non-science disciplines divorcing themselves too readily from the natural sciences. We cannot understand science, its successes or failures, if we do not ‘take account certain facts about nature, not the least of which is that we are part of it’ (Smolin 1997: 369). He concludes that ‘science works, in spite of or even because of the fact that our ideas are developed in the milieu of our culture’ (Smolin, 1997: 369).
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Interestingly, though, science works, ‘in the absence of a fixed method or fixed set of rules’ and this is because of the ethic, fundamental to science, ‘which recognizes that while any individual is obligated to champion what they honestly believe, no individual is the arbiter of correctness’ (Smolin, 1997: 369). Science is not the only path to knowledge, nor comes with ‘a method’, for Smolin. Science, for him, is ‘most fundamentally defined as a collection of ethical communities, each organized around a particular subject’ (Smolin in Unger and Smolin, 2015: 363). The principles these communities (as all democracies) hold are: 1. When rational argument from public evidence suffices to decide a question, it must be considered to be so decided. 2. When rational argument from public evidence does not suffice to decide a question, the community must encourage a diverse range of viewpoints and hypotheses consistent with a good-faith attempt to develop convincing public evidence. (Smolin in Unger and Smolin, 2015: 363–4).
It follows that: ‘science is that activity by means of which we display the same respect for nature that we aspire to show each other in a democratic society’ (Smolin, 1997: 364). Naturalism and science then are an ‘ethical commitment’ (Smolin, 1997: 364). Maybe this is why science matters to society then, he suggests: because it is part of the ‘centuries old experiment to discover what democracy is’ (Smolin, 1997: 370). In its ideal form, science is about consensus shared without coercion, working for humanity, in the context of the cosmos working on us. He goes as far as to suggest that perhaps we should ‘[envision] the universe as something analogous to a community’ as part of the ‘parallel development of the projects of science and democracy’ (Smolin, 1997: 370). This is an intriguing suggestion in the context of recent debates on post-human democracy, and indeed interesting echoes of this argument will be developed in this book in Parts II and III as we explore the need to push beyond in how we think about cosmology, international relations, and democracy today.
Complex Open Systems Another key aspect of Smolin’s view is the emphasis on open systems and the reflections on the possibility of mutability and novelty in social and cosmic life. If cosmic life is not defined by ‘laws’ but a process of co-evolution of and through relations that has brought about self-organizing systems such as stars, galaxies, and life; then we must too move away from analysis of ‘laws of society’ or ‘fixed equilibria’ of behaviour. We must move away from ‘the mythical timeless state of nature’ (Smolin, 2014: 260).
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Old unhelpful ideas about timeless laws are played out especially in social sciences such as economics, he points out. The attraction of a timeless notion of equilibrium attracts with its mythical elements those not aware of the poverty of thinking through this outdated frame of reference. Instead of being attracted by these frames, we must turn to models of economy which are path-dependent, evolving of causal relations in time and where open systems, and complex interactions of open systems, are grappled with. We must meld economy and ecology, to see them as ‘open complex systems evolving in time, with path dependence, many equilibria, governed by feedback’ (Smolin, 2014: 263). Social sciences such as economics must, for ‘our civilization to thrive’ develop a more coherent view of the world in which crucially there is a ‘consilience between natural and social science’ (Smolin, 2014: 263). This is not all, however, for Smolin does not stop at calling for new ways of thinking in social sciences and society. He is also interested in the already-taking-place transitions in science, paralleled in society. He sees a ‘new pluralistic stage of the Enlightenment’ arising (Smolin, 2014: 2650). He says we can trace this in many ways. In Italy, for example, he suggests that this very transition is spoken in terms of a movement from strong theory to weak theory, that is, there is a shift from rational knowers of truths (strong theory) to children of Wittgenstein and Godel (weak theory). He welcomes this shift as lifting the weight of old metaphysical and religious expectations on us and our knowledge, and on our ways of being. ‘I would like to contrast the heaviness of the old and failed attempts at absolute knowledge with the lightness of the type of philosophy we are now aspiring to develop’ (Smolin, 1997: 371). The search for truth, he points out has weighed us down by implying a final destination, ‘meaningfulness of being at rest, Newton’s absolute space, or hierarchy, in knowledge and society, “of stasis” ’ (Smolin, 1997: 371). Against this, and the weightiness of utopianism: I would like to set the lightness of the new search for knowledge, which is based in the understanding that the world is a network of relations, that what was once thought to be absolute is always subject to evolution and renegotiation, that the complete truth about the world is not graspable as any single point of view, but only resides in the totality of several or many distinct views. (1997: 371–2)
In the Epilogue to Life of the Cosmos he expounds on the transition that he sees: in paintings of Picasso and the surrealists and abstract expressionists; in music of Stravinsky and Pert; in the dances of Martha Graham; in Wittgenstein’s antiphilosophy; in Godel’s theorem; in modern topology; in literature and theater, in molecular biology and the visions of Margulis and Lovelock . . . we see a great shift of where humans are looking to find and to create coherence and beauty in
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the world . . . And I hope I have convinced the reader that the signs of a great transition maybe read nowhere more clearly than in the incomplete and unresolved state of our physical and cosmological theories. (Smolin, 1997: 367)
There are connections ‘between the kinds of ideas that those of us who work in cosmology are thinking about and the ideas that one hears now being spoken about in philosophy, art, theology, and political and social theory’ (Smolin, 1997: 368). He points out, almost as a mission statement for us, that: We are all trying to understand what democracy might mean in a world dominated by consumer capitalism, a growing ecological crisis, a widening gap between rich and poor, and the permanent confrontation of peoples with radically different cultures and expectations about life . . . We are all, in one way or another, trying to understand what it means to construct a description of a complete universe, from the inside, without reference either to fixed external structures, a single fixed point of view, or absolute imperatives. (Smolin, 1997: 368)
This book is part of this effort of trying to figure out what emerges from the ‘light’ orientation he points to. I am involved in a project of trying to work through what the implications of his arguments are for the ‘social’ world, for International Relations. This is important, for the social and cosmological—scientifically—are implicated in important ways. As Smolin emphasizes: This new view of universe we aspire to will include cosmology in which life has a proper and meaningful place in the world. That is, in the end the image I want to leave is that life is light, both because what we are is matter energized by the passage of photons through the biosphere and because what is essential in life is without weight, but only pattern, structure, information. And because the logic of life is continual change, continual motion, continual evolution. (Smolin 1997: 372).
Smolin’s is a universe not of mechanisms but a universe of novelty. The universe is not like a clock; it is, he argues, more like a city, which has no ‘maker’, where old is recycled into new, where novelty emerges, where we are confronted by each other ‘as the makers of our shared world’ (Smolin, 1997: 373). ‘We all made it or no one did, we are of it, and to be of it and to be one of its makers is the same thing’ (Smolin, 1997: 373). This is why it is so important that we also work through the theological origins of our thinking. Theological and authoritarian legacies mislead us. Revealing his view on organized religion, Smolin argues that:
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there never was a God, no pilot who made the world by imposing order on chaos and who remains outside, watching and proscribing. And Nietsche is also now dead. The eternal return, death are no longer threats . . . The world will always be here, and it will always be different, more varied, interesting, more alive . . . There is nothing behind it, no absolute or platonic world to transcend to. All there is of Nature is what is around us . . . All we may expect of human law is what we can negotiate among ourselves and what we take as our responsibility. All we may gain knowledge must be drawn from what we can see with our eyes or what others tell us they have seen with their eyes. All we may expect of justice is compassion. All we may look up to as judges are each other. All that is possible of utopia is what we make with our own hands. Pray let it be enough. (Smolin, 1997: 373)
Questions that Emerge from this Orientation There are various other forms of relational thinking which have emerged from cosmological, philosophical, theological, natural scientific, and social theoretical frames of reference in recent years, and as such relational cosmology does not stand aloof from these kinds of interventions. Indeed, as Smolin indicates, he sees relational cosmology as part of a wider relational re-relating to the world taking place around us. But what are the implications of this relational view, and how does it fit with, complement, contrast against other kinds of relational views of the world already developed in the social sciences? If there is a relational revolution already on the way, which Smolin suggests, how does this relational cosmology fit into this relational revolution and vice versa? And how might relational cosmology help us in following up the relational pathways of thinking in social sciences and IR? How might we extend or improve the relational vocabulary and insight? Part II of the book explores what happens if one places relational cosmology in relation to other forms of relationalism and if one reads these through this orientation. Important questions arise from this, I argue, for social sciences and IR but also, I argue for relational cosmology. Indeed, in what follows I push relational thinking in directions unexpected for Smolin himself by bringing him into a fuller conversation with critical theory and critical and post-humanism. The epistemological, ontological, and ethical moves argued for in chapters 4–6 arise from a relational cosmological starting point but develop Smolin’s arguments in new, interesting, directions he did not think to explore, in part not having had the ‘help’ of relational critical social science to allow such a development. Second, important questions arise from Smolin’s framework for the ways in which relational literature works, is read, and is deployed in the social sciences. Indeed, as we will see, a new set of orientations and also new dialogues can be
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developed among relationalisms in the humanities and social sciences, for example, between decolonial thought on relationality and ‘Western’ scientific views on relationality. And we see that important political and ethical as well as scientific consequences arise for how we process ‘in the mesh’ of relations around us: if we have no moral laws and if humans too are made in relations, who and what should we be ethically committed to and how should we do politics on the planet?
Conclusion Relational cosmology is a challenging physical and cosmological theory, and simultaneously both seeks to contribute to social thought and brings social thought to bear on physicists’ understandings of how it is they think and know. While Smolin has not explicitly developed the outcomes of his orientation to chemistry, biology, geology, or politics, a relational cosmology clearly orients itself in a way which taps into the already existing relational orientations in these sciences, the processual currents in geology, the relational biology of Margulis, the change-oriented social theory of Unger and others. Yet, it does not develop all the connections which it could: to new materialism for example, or to critical and post-humanist ethics. A more systematic and full exploration of relational cosmology’s implications to social thought and the interaction of natural and social science can be explored, fruitfully, I believe, and it is to this task that the book now turns. What I offer is a sympathetic, but not faithful, ‘translation’ of Smolin’s notions into debates in critical social theory and IR theory on how we might rethink our condition of co-existence, our attempts to produce knowledge, and our political and ethical commitments in a relational universe.
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4 Stretching Situated Knowledge ‘We’, human beings, are first and foremost the subjects who do the observing of this world . . . . But we are also an integral part of the world which we perceive; we are not external observers. We are situated within it. Our view of it is from within its midst. (Rovelli, 2014: 64) To describe [new phenomena], scientists sometimes coin new words such as ‘electron’ and ‘gene’, but more frequently they continue to use the old words with a new but related meaning. This is a trap for the unwary who may assume that words such as space and time, energy and force, have the same meaning as in ordinary speech. (Hodgson, 2005: 10) This chapter explores the consequences of relational cosmology for the process of ‘knowing’. If there are no ‘outside’ views to the cosmos, if we are ‘situated within it’ as Rovelli puts it, what are the implications for our knowledge and do these travel also to the study of the ‘social world’ (if we can speak of such) or the study of International Relations? In this chapter I explore these questions in dialogue with relational cosmology and at the same time certain strands of ‘postpositivist’ social theory/epistemology which for some time have been grappling with the death of ‘objectivity’. In particular, I try to ‘think together’ with relational cosmology and standpoint epistemology, as both strands of thought are intensely interested in negotiating ‘situated knowledge’ and its implications. In this chapter I try to show that relational cosmology confirms the importance of ‘situated knowledge’ for all knowledge construction—in the natural and the human and social sciences. I try to also show that ‘dealing with’ situated knowledge might in fact entail something over and beyond what current social scientific understandings of situated knowledge have allowed us to grasp. Indeed, via relational cosmology, I seek to develop here the notion of ‘stretchy’ situated knowledge. Building on an earlier initial exploration of this topic (Kurki, 2015), but elaborating on it, the chapter seeks to explicate the implications for social sciences and IR of taking seriously the situated knowing predicament in the cosmos. Our ‘social science’ problems of knowledge construction can be seen as embedded in much wider knowledge construction problems, and from this perspective our specific ‘epistemological’ troubles also are in part shifted.
International Relations in a Relational Universe. Milja Kurki, Oxford University Press (2020). © Milja Kurki. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198850885.001.0001
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I start by setting out the implications of situated knowledge as it has so far been developed in the social sciences and IR. This necessitates a detailed revisitation of ‘standpoint epistemology’. In the second part of the chapter, however, I challenge standpoint epistemology as I explore how we might think about situated knowledge as cosmologically situated and what this means for ‘the limits of our knowledge’. I also discuss the implications for how we might, as a consequence, think methods in a different way through the kind of ‘critical relational approach’ which emerges here. The final section of the chapter brings IR into an initial conversation with this orientation. I challenge positivist knowledge production and method thinking, but also, in certain ways, existing postpositivist and critical theoretical approaches to knowledge. I argue that relational cosmology, while it originated from ‘outside’ of social science, helps us to navigate the difficult waters of knowledge production also in social science and IR. It helps to correct for some of the biases social theories do not see and also at the same time shows that knowledge construction problems in the ‘natural sciences’ and the ‘social sciences’ are not as distinct as we often think. It further helps us orient towards the challenges of being and becoming we take on in chapter 5: if we are of the world we can also relate to it in ways which are not merely analytical or epistemological. The significance of this will be picked up in chapter 5, which addresses how we might, from relational cosmology, stretch to not only understand our relations but also become in our relations in a more open and dynamic way.
The Problem of Knowledge in the Social Sciences The aim of the social sciences has been to better understand the ‘social’ and ‘political’ drivers of human life. Whether we are interested in individual or collective actions, social sciences have tried to provide us with the tools to understand how humans and their societies function—empirically and theoretically. Yet knowledge construction in the social sciences has been a particularly contested affair. The so-called positivist and behaviouralist researchers have looked to ‘natural’ sciences for inspiration, in particular the empiricist tradition within the sciences. Careful observation of patterns of behaviour, they argue, allows us to identify regularities of behaviour, which also allow us to control social life through the design of policies which may be able to manipulate behavioural trends. If the physical sciences can be scientific in coming to know the patterns of nature, social sciences too can aspire to finding if not ‘laws’, regularities, or patterns of discernible kind (Knorr and Rosenau, 2017 [1969]; Nicholson, 1994; see also Kurki, 2008; Jackson, 2011). Yet the postpositivists have challenged the dominance of positivist ways of knowing across the social sciences, including IR (see e.g. Delanty, 1997; Hollis and
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Smith, 1990). One of the key claims of ‘postpositivist’ social science philosophies and methodologies such as hermeneutics and phenomenology and social theories like constructivism, Marxism, critical theory, postcolonialism, and feminism, has been to emphasize the very specific ways in which we should approach attempts to ‘know’ about the ‘social’. For these social science theorists, when we observe the mineral structures of rocks or the processes of star formation, we relate to such objects in a very different way to how we relate to humans. Human subjects are, as objects of investigation for human knowers, very different kinds of ontological objects: we share many aspects of the thought processes, conceptual underpinnings, and value systems with the ‘objects of study’. The subjects of knowledge production are then bound to the objects of study in the social and historical sciences in unique ways. There is no easy ‘outside’ view on human relations for human knowers bound in those relations. This generates special demands for human ‘sciences’, if indeed human sciences can be sciences at all (on debate on this see e.g. Winch, 1990; Bhaskar, 1998 [1978]; Sayer, 2000). If the positivists tried to ‘unify’ the sciences under empiricist methods of systematic observation, a science/art and/or natural science/social science split emerges from the postpositivist perspectives seeking to defend the unique qualities of the ‘social science’. As Bhaskar’s critical naturalism (1998 [1978]) emphasized: if social sciences can be scientific (and for him they can), they are scientific in a very different way from the natural sciences due to their unique (human) objects of study. Despite these contestations over explanation and understanding, positivism and postpositivism share a commitment to the importance of the study of the social, the political, the economic. We must, somehow, get a handle on the humans—their behaviour, their understandings, their ‘social’ relations. Although we might never fully know ‘other minds’ we can and should examine how human action, meaning-making, and reasoning work. Everyone (including positivists) accept that in the humanities and social sciences, observer biases will always trouble us in the study of human subjects, but, across the board, it is suggested that through rigorous methods, whether positivist (falsifiability) or postpositivist (reflexivity), we can hope to shed light on the drivers and dynamics of human interaction problems. It is crucial to note that the controversies about scientific knowledge in the social sciences emerge in part from the problems of defining not just what it is to know in the social world but what knowing is in the sciences. It is in many respects in response to ‘modern science’ that the problems of social science knowledge construction have emerged. It is in part because the natural sciences have been seen to be about laws, objective knowledge, and falsification that human and social sciences have sought to move away from such science. And of course development of modern science in modern twentieth-century universities has also reflected the specialization of knowledge so characteristic of
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modern scientific ‘knowledge production’. There was no ‘biology’, ‘chemistry’, ‘economics’, ‘politics’, or ‘sociology’ as we know them now in ancient Egypt or Greece. The specialization of knowledge is a relatively recent historical development, with most sciences arising, with their specific ‘objects’ of study, in the last three hundred years. ‘Medicine’, ‘physics’, ‘economics’, ‘sociology’, and ‘international relations’ are in part social constructions, which have also ‘created’ their ‘objects’. The problems of ‘social’ knowing arise as the problems of scientific knowledge production start to be deciphered in particular ways in specific historical contexts (see e.g. Owens, 2012; Latour, 1993; 2004b; 2007). And, simultaneously, we should not forget that our divisions of social and natural sciences are in part tied up with particular cosmological assumptions about the nature of the universe. If humans stand apart from Nature then what we need are unique human sciences to understand the unique humans. If the natural is a different kind of ‘background’, this can be known from the ‘outside’. It is crucial to note that the meta-theoretical debates in philosophy of science and social theory have been informed, if implicitly, also by cosmological background assumptions. What does it then do to come to knowledge production from the point of view of relational cosmology? What does it do to think the ‘social’ and the ‘natural’ and knowledge production of them through a relational orientation? I explore this below. I start my exploration with standpoint epistemologists, who, just like relational cosmologists, foreground situated knowledge as the key starting point for knowing.
Standpoint Epistemology and Situated Knowledge Standpoint epistemology developed by Sandra Harding, Nancy Hartsock, and others arose from critical and Marxist social theory and is especially closely associated with feminism. It was motivated by the wish to critique positivism,¹ but also skepticism of the more hard-edged forms of constructivism and poststructuralism in the social sciences. If hermeneutic critics of positivism argued that our knowledge is characterized by our closeness to the objects of study, what standpoint epistemologists attack is the very reasonableness of the positivist expectation that objective knowledge is possible. For them, knowledge is always situated and as such to even assume that there might be neutral knowledge available to social beings about the social world
¹ Positivism is a much contested notion of course. I take it to consist of a philosophy of science which is premised on an empiricist epistemology, and as such on development of systematic observational methodologies. Ontologically positivists tend to be ‘instrumentalist’: ‘objects’ of science exist insofar as they are useful as sets of beliefs that can make sense of our observations.
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is a foolish starting point. And crucially, the problems of relativism in relation to situated knowledge arise, Harding argues, not from standpoint epistemology but from the expectation that there can be a singular universal truth; from the expectation that somehow a God’s eye view is available (Harding, 1993: 61). If we see the falseness of this starting point, we also see the possibility of a situated knowledge which leads to a kind of objectivity, what Harding calls strong objectivity. Strong objectivity is the kind of objectivity that is premised on the situatedness of a social agent in social processes. It is argued that only those in the social relations can really know the processes they are in. We always know from within social relations, not outside of them. As such, women’s experiences of oppression, for example, can be known better by them, from their situated perspectives, rather than be captured from the outside by seemingly objective knowers. Crucially, for standpoint epistemology ‘perspectivalism’ of situated knowledge is not a weakness, it is a strength; indeed, situatedness is the origin of ‘strong objectivity’. Strong objectivity only emerges from situated knowledge. Knowledge of the ‘marginal’ or ‘oppressed’ is crucial for ‘good knowledge’: it is the origin of better, deeper, knowledge of social structures. It is precisely for this reason, then, that ‘[r]esearch, particularly that focused on power relations, should begin with the lives of the marginalized’ (Bowell, 2019). Privileged perspectives on the other hand are delimited: ‘knowledge claims are always socially situated, and the failure by dominant groups critically and systematically to interrogate their advantaged social situation and the effects of such advantages . . . leaves [them] disadvantaged’ in scientific and epistemological terms in the generation of their knowledge (Harding, 1993: 54). When privileged perspectives participate in relations of capitalism and patriarchy for example, a lack of awareness of the embeddedness of these knowers in such structures, and a socially situated ‘interest’ to (not) know about these structures in particular ways, can lead privileged knowers to presume that they can ‘stand aside’ from the objects of knowledge. Biases and blind spots inevitably creep into how we know social relations we are in and they can creep into the research process ‘at every stage’ (Harding, 1991: 40) through concepts, through hypotheses, through design of research, through interpretation and collection of data, through research problems set. As Schneider (2005: 103) emphasizes, summarizing the view of Donna Haraway, another developer of situated knowledge: ‘vision, seeing, looking always must come from somewhere and from someone or something . . . . It cannot come from everywhere, all at once; it cannot be total, it cannot be complete.’ But how should we get to strong objectivity then in the social sciences? ‘How can . . . politicized research [feminist research, say] be increasing the objectivity of inquiry?’ (Harding, 1986: 24). Crucially, feminist standpoint epistemology suggests that this process of developing strong objectivity is tied to a process of political struggle. Situated knowing
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is not just about occupying a perspective, a standpoint, a position, but about emergence of a standpoint ‘earned through the experience of collective political struggle’, a struggle that requires, as Nancy Hartsock puts it, ‘both science and politics’ (Harding, 2004: 8). This is why the dominated are better placed to achieve a standpoint of unequal power relations: they engage the subject politically. It is likely that the dominators can also know their domination, but they do not often ‘need’ to politically engage in understanding the world, and hence are less likely to ‘acquire the standpoint’ that allows them to relate to the relations which make their social positions possible. Knowledge emerges from the collective engagement, struggle, and reflection through political engagement. As is clear, nowhere in this picture is neutral knowledge valorized, for it has no place in thinking about social knowledge. Even the dominant perspectives and the knowledge of ‘objectivists’ is, in fact, situated knowledge. It is situated knowledge that has not developed through conscious ‘standpoint’ formation through political struggle. This kind of ‘weak’ objectivity, which lacks knowledge of its foundations, biases and blind spots, is not irrelevant but it is misconceived if it is to ‘dominate’ knowledge formation in society. It is also oppressive if knowledge claims continue to perpetuate rather than interrogate the origin and nature of the oppression. Standpoint epistemology has not gone uncontested. It has been accused of assuming an automatic kind of authority to specific subject positions, women, or the proletariat in its earlier Marxist formulation. Yet, as we have seen, situated knowledge does not imply that a ‘standpoint’ emerges automatically: it is a matter of struggle, reflection, and individual and collective processing. Indeed, here the role of ‘others’ is revealed in standpoint epistemology. Standpoint epistemologists are concerned about knowledge as more than an individual viewpoint but point to it also as a relational, shared achievement. Strong objectivity is achieved in part through exposure to others, marginal others especially, but also the dominant others. But this raises the question: how are these relations with others to be conducted in the struggle to develop strong objectivity? Through a kind of democratization of knowledge claims, argues Sandra Harding. If we start from the marginalized voices, listening to them, we already have a good starting point. But in listening to others, of course we must also expose ourselves, and others, to perspectival debate, which essentially takes the form of a democratic dialogue.
Limitations of Standpoint Epistemology Standpoint epistemology provides for us an interesting perspective to knowledge construction in the social sciences and the study of IR, for four reasons.
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First, it is interesting because it shows a way for social scientists to deal with, to face up to, their situatedness but also allows them to speak to the world confidently from these perspectives of situatedness. There is good reason, from this perspective, to give up on the objective viewpoint as an illusion to which we should not compare our knowledge, in sciences or social sciences. Second, standpoint epistemology also gives us an important appreciation of knowledge as ‘achieved’ and as ‘collective’ rather than as emanating from nonrelated, non-connected ‘authority’, or from the ‘outside’; standpoint epistemology usefully emphasizes that knowledge arises inescapably from relations we are in and is itself relational knowledge—standpoints are not authority positions outside of relations but relational by definition. We should seek this exposure with a sense of pluralism of knowledge perspectives and commitment to a sense of democracy about knowledge production. Knowledge is a process, not an endpoint; it is an achievement and a negotiation of not just knowledge but also the world around us and political struggles and dialogue in it. Dialogue on knowledge, then, is essential because we always negotiate perspectives, and our politics, relationally with others, not because we must obtain a consensus or a God’s eye point of view. Standpoint epistemology thus also, fourth, reveals the inherent politics of knowledge from this, or any, perspective. There is no way in which we can come to know ‘from the outside’, without a politics, a position, a stake, a commitment. All knowledge is political as it is dialogical, contested, relational, and situated. Even as this perspective is important, it also entails, arguably, some puzzling questions. First, as explored elsewhere (Kurki, 2015), there is an important issue that arises from standpoint epistemology around how one achieves a movement ‘beyond’ one’s own situatedness. How do we negotiate our own positionality and the limitations that our situatedness enforces on us? Do we need to reach ‘beyond’ our situatedness somehow and, if so, how do we do so? Standpoint epistemology assumes that situating knowledge, and political struggle to realize relations anew, brings for us a better knowledge, but it also thus comes to assume the (strong) objectivity of the knowledge so engendered. Is it enough to situate and to struggle for better knowledge or might something else be required? And how do we ‘relate’ to the relations within which our knowledge is constructed given the infinite capacity of our relational positionings to hide our relational positionings? In answering these questions, relational cosmology provides us with useful pointers, or reorientations. In what follows I seek to make the claim that, if we take the insights of relational cosmology on situated knowledge seriously, we gain a sharper perspective on our limitations as knowers in relations. In these relations, because of our situatedness, relations also ‘escape’ us. Political struggle can be one way of ‘pushing ourselves’ to know anew, but it is, I suggest below, important to
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push ‘beyond’ in this process, not only to ‘ground down’ to situatedness. Stretchy situated knowledge calls for a kind of queering, a messing up, of knowledge and concepts as a condition of ‘dealing with’ our situated knowledge.
Stretching Situated Knowledge There are striking similarities of perspective between relational cosmology and postpositivist social science epistemologies, especially standpoint epistemology. Not only do both emphasize situated knowledge but they also call for recognition of the plurality of knowers, hold on to a belief in the analysis of ‘reality’, and call for an open, democratic, pluralist science. But there are also differences. Perhaps most strikingly, the starting point of relational cosmology is not socially situated knowledge but situated knowledge in the universe. How does starting from this, rather than ‘social epistemology’ shift our perspective? Might it help us in dealing with some of the limitations of situated knowledge? I want to suggest here that relational cosmology suggests three provocations not adequately dealt with in dealings with situated knowledge so far. First, the fact that situated knowing is a condition of all knowing in the cosmos challenges the ‘social’ ontology focus of much of standpoint epistemology. The problem, in sum, is not that we are socially situated per se but that we are far more widely situated, in relations, dynamic unfolding processing of multiple relations in the universe. We cannot, by definition, exclude from our concern for example ‘non-social’ relations which standpoint epistemologists show little interest in (consequences of this are explored in detail in chapter 5). Second, standpoint epistemology assumes that we can develop an access to strong objectivity through political engagement and knowing from a standpoint. How this is negotiated exactly between viewpoints is left vague, however. How should we be able to break away from weak objectivity to strong objective knowledge? And does standpoint epistemology adequately deal with the limitations of our knowledge formed in our relational contexts? Our relational knowledge is also surely ‘tainted’ because of its situated entanglements, so how do we reach beyond our limitations, to strong objectivity? Third, standpoint epistemologists’ concern is our situatedness in oppressive social relations, and the aim of standpoint thinking is to develop knowledge and a politics to address this. It is not my aim to sidestep this important argument—for oppressions of various kinds are involved in life around us, including as we will see the very notions of human and non-human explored in the following chapter. Nevertheless, for relational cosmology our challenge is even wider: we are always situated in relations, not just when they are ‘oppressive’. As we process in the world much of our ethics (as responsiveness, as argued in chapter 6) is about
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cutting into oppressive structures and practices, but we do not necessarily have ‘abstract’ categories for such judgements, and as with any way of ‘cutting the world’, oppression is just one way of doing so. Thus, we do not have to start with situating in ‘oppression’. In a sense then, one could say that standpoint epistemology’s concern with oppression presents us with a particular type of knowledge or way of relating within the wider challenge of situated knowing (where multiple kinds of ethico-political commitments and ‘cuts’ are possible).
Relational Cosmology as Situated Knowledge Standpoint epistemologies imply that particular kinds of relatedness provide insight, special insight, to relations. If we cannot know from the outside, we must be in relations and we know from there. We never know ‘from the outside’ of relations. Yet, we may know from relations differently because we may understand and ‘relate’ to our relations quite differently, in part due to what our differential positionalities in relations allow. We then do not know, experience, or feel all our relations in the world. This is precisely the problem: we do not see all of our relations, how they matter (for) us, sometimes precisely because in them we can be embedded in ways of thinking and being which make experiencing our very relations impossible. It is, for example, precisely because in capitalist social relations we are led to experience ourselves as autonomous individuals that our concern for how we make each other in relations is ‘turned off ’. When we inhabit ‘weak objectivity’ then most of the crucial relations go unrecognized. The question then arises: How should we know our relations? Do we gain access to (all) the relations we are in and if not what is required to know them, approximate at them? And can we know beyond our situatedness? For example, can a white person know the oppression of a black person? Can a male boss understand women labourers’ standpoints? Interestingly, relational cosmology gives us some tools to break these kinds of questions down. In relational situated knowledge in the cosmos, we are all recognized to be related in the universe (more on this in the next chapter). On this planet we are likely to be related in roughly similar ways to certain large-scale cosmological relations. For example, we are subject to similar (although intriguingly not identical) gravitational effects of mass in spacetime, similar inter- (or intra-) actions of baryonic matter particles, and similar electromagnetic fields. This is what makes a lot of technologies work, but also which gives us some stability of expectations vis-à-vis effects of a certain ‘natural’ kind. Yet, we also relate differently within these relations, for we process differently through many other relations. Although states are almost universal as a mode of organization we do not share the same state structures. Nor do we share all
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cultural norms. And because of this we also relate differently to our ‘cosmological’ context (in this sense, you could even say that we ‘live’ in different ‘worlds’, see discussion of pluriverse in ch. 5). Even as we are in the same universe we do not necessarily share experiences or relational connections in the universe. In our varied ways of relating, we are made relationally in unique ways, which means we also relate to relations we are of and in differently. Nothing in relations is ‘the same’. And there is no God’s eye view in a relational universe, only situated ‘approximations’ or ‘cuts’,² from relations we are processing. This is in part why even when the concepts we use to describe the world are the same—family, democracy and the state—we relate or translate their meanings in different conceptual universes and with differential (though often complexly related) material unfoldings. We also relate very differently to material processing of food and ecological contexts, and we are differently structured in relation to various forms of matter and tools. As we will see in the next chapter, we process differential relationalities: ‘socially’ and often simultaneously ‘materially’. Crucially for our purposes here, our different relations in these regards tend to cause us to know in different ways. We interpret the world differently from different situated relations. But how then can we process ourselves so as to expose ourselves to our relations anew? And can we, should we, ‘re-relate’ to our relations as we seek to know relationally? Standpoint epistemology seemingly helps us. It says: we must struggle, process, relate through relations, in them and out of them, in dialogue and learning with others. We can and probably should start with marginal knowledges. This is all very well; we do need to ‘deal’ with situatedness by exploring it within ourselves and in relation to others. Dialogue, struggle, and conversation can help us see our roles—as oppressors as well as oppressed—and to re-relate to not only relations but as such the human others we structure in our relations. To give an example, by engaging with standpoints of female early career researchers, starting from their experiences, I may come to understand my relations of ignorance as well as complicity in reproduction of their troubles by my own actions. Our relations facilitated through university, class, race, and differential negotiations of gender situate us differently, and relatedly, in ways which I can try and learn to think anew, feel anew, and act anew. So situating, listening is a good starting point, and yet we need, relational cosmology would suggest, something else too. What is that?
² As a reviewer of this book correctly notes, there is a sense in which approximation is not an apt description for the challenge of knowing in relations, for the world here does not exist ‘separately’ from us as we cut into it with our knowledge, which is also a type of relating. Yet, Smolin’s notion of (re) approximation also is helpful in emphasizing the sense in which the world ‘exceeds’ our capacity to make sense of it. I am thankful for this comment by the reviewer.
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Relational cosmology makes an important argument about the approximations we use to know. That is, the emphasis of relational cosmology is also on the limitations of our knowledge arising from the relations we are in; and ultimately, it is argued, it is these limitations of situated knowing that we need to also ‘deal with’. This is where standpoint epistemology fails, for while many important insights are emphasized with regard to how we can know and must know situatedly and how to struggle for better knowledge, there is little capacity in standpoint epistemology to take seriously the limitations created for our knowledge by the very relations we are in. For example, our university relations to fellow academics may be subject to relations we are not aware of. Or we may relate to ecological surroundings we live in in ways which we are not aware of, or able to ‘capture’ conceptually, emotionally. We may exist in relations which we cannot relate to, at least through ‘knowledge’ (as a way of relating). We may for example have difficulty to relate our own marketization in capitalist higher education, or the privileged power relations with animals in global food production. How do we relate to these relations? Relational cosmology emphasizes that our knowledge of the world around us arises from relations we are in. Yet, they emphasize—helpfully—that as relational knowledge, such knowledge is also limited knowledge: related as we are we are also ‘captured’ in relational understandings. Focus then on what we know in our situatedness is always troublesome, for our ‘immediate’ ‘felt’ relations is not all there is and it is precisely the limitations of what we know which should challenge us. What we feel as our relations, our experience of these relations, is always limited, partial—even as we try to reach beyond by understanding others. The challenge is, as Feynman so famously put it, our surroundings, can be quite ‘absurd from the point of view of common sense’ (Feynman, 1985). Exposing us to this—in a very interesting analogy to the calls of critical theory—is the aim of science. In a relational universe struggle for a standpoint then is never ‘over’; never ‘complete’, as standpoint epistemology tends to assume. Strong objectivity is never an absolute, but a limited standpoint itself. Relational cosmology’s first impulse is then not only to situate, to ‘relate down’ to our felt, known, relations. For Smolin, all our knowledge, all our concepts, are approximate only, always inadequate, reflecting of the kinds of sensibilities that it is sensible for people like us to think through living in the kinds of societies and relations we live in. To borrow Terry Rudolf’s phrase, all our theories and knowledge are ‘monkey realistic’,³ realistic to the kinds of beings we are, in the kind of societies we live. ³ Terry Rudolf (2014) argues that in trying to understand quantum physics we act akin to monkeys responding to removal from their visual field of a banana: we believe our senses and our visual
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Why is recognizing this important? Because we should treat our situated knowledge with much more circumspection and tentativeness from this perspective. From this perspective we need to, first, recognize the limits of our human brains. Our brains are powerful organs. Developed in the geophysical, chemical, and biological context of this planet, they are finely tuned to respond to survival challenges of an energy-guzzling animal we are. Yet, their capacities are reflective of the needs of our type of ape where we are in the cosmos in terms of our cognition. We developed to see tigers coming at us, and to keep them at bay, but we did not evolve to ‘understand the universe’ or quantum mechanics, nor did we necessarily evolve to understand complex interconnections on this planet. Sciences tell us, paradoxically, that we should not assume that we can have access to the universe from where we come to know it. Certainly we can’t know it from the ‘outside’. Second, relational cosmology also demands we recognize the limits of our concepts. We should not assume that our concepts are able to get at the world. Our concepts reflect what is sensible for us to think, given our capacities, living in our societies. Now the physicists, I think, appreciate the limitations of our conceptual knowledge better than many social scientists. While in the social sciences we worry about the historical and social situatedness of concepts, we still tend to assume we can use our concepts to understand. Relational cosmologists say that none of ‘our’ concepts really captures things. Indeed, for relational cosmology, science’s role is not to capture the world through our concepts but rather to queer ‘our’ concepts, mess them up, break apart what is ‘sensible’ for us. There is, in Feynman’s words, ‘always an edge of mystery, always a place where we have some fiddling around yet to do’ (Feynman, 1992 [1965]: 33). Think of the advances in science: invention of spacetime, the notion of the field, the idea of a quark. No one knows what these concepts mean ‘as such’. Indeed, that is why they are so useful as scientific concepts: because we do not quite know what they mean. From this perspective, it is exactly this queering of our concepts, which is the basis of science, its method. This is far less appreciated in the social sciences. We tend to think in the social sciences that we have some privileged type of access, through our brains, to us humans: as set out before, we tend to think we can know the humans because we are human. But why should this be so? Being related in human societies gives us some access to human societies and brains, but there is nothing obvious about our
cognition tells us truths. We are cognitively hardwired to understand that a banana is a solid object that cannot disappear without an identifiable physical cause, not to appreciate quantum mechanical properties of it.
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relationality with humans or brains which ‘as such’ gives us privileged access to humans or their brains. Our relations are also limitations: because we are so close to the human and because we live in the human societies, our ways of conceiving them are those of our relations with them. Indeed, we know the human from the relations (‘biologically’ as well as ‘socially’) that construct the human as an entity. As Rouse (in Barad, 2007: 49) poignantly puts it: it is a legacy of a very particular Cartesian rationalism to think that we have more ready an access to human affairs than the things outside the human because we are human. Relational cosmology pushes us on this front. From this perspective what we have are always deeply situated conceptual approximations, re-approximations, or (as is developed in chapters that follow) at the same time particular ways of ‘cutting’ into the world, relationally, that is, particular kinds of ways of relating. But this means not that we should ground in our own approximations or cuts but that our concepts should also be pushed, messed up, queered up in trying to ‘deal with’ the limitations of our own realisms. From a relational cosmology perspective, standpoint epistemology’s tendency then to ‘ground’ our knowledge in situatedness, even struggles, can be seen as problematic. If we are limited knowers, socially but also cosmologically, perhaps we should have less confidence than is implied in our knowledge, even of the ‘social’ or ‘human’ affairs. Perhaps we are more limited than the confident situatedness of standpoint epistemology allows us to think through. Relational cosmology, by taking us back to the principle of (re)approximation, directs us to do something different as knowers. We should not just situate to what we are in, even though this and the social struggle involved is also important (partly because it can stretch us). Perhaps also we need to do more: to actively queer, mess up, break up what is sensible for us to think in the kind of conceptual systems in which we tend to think. Maybe science, and social science, is about breaking up and pushing beyond: the ‘anarchy of science’ (Brooks, 2012). In order to understand relations we must then try to push beyond our (understanding of) relations. And in so doing we should and do inevitably try to ‘rerelate’ to relations we are in and of. We should in sum try to ‘stretch’ our situated knowledge and relations. This stretching can be Maxwell stretching to understand electromagnetism through the concept of the ‘field’. Or it can be the stretching by Foucault to understand government through the concept of conduct of conduct. This stretching can be Adorno’s thinking on negative dialectic. And this stretching can also be standpoint epistemologists stretching our understandings of what happens in a gendered factory through exposure to women’s knowledge. What is significant about recognizing stretching then is not that it provides us with some new way of knowing, a new epistemology to be ‘valorized’, but simply that it emphasizes, constantly, our limitations as knowers and pushes us always beyond what we think we know.
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Interestingly, and as elaborated in the next chapter, this stretching can also be less than analytical. It can be about exposing our being, our becoming, to relations in new ways. This may involve development of new feelings and experiences, not necessarily new concepts or ‘knowledge’ in a traditional analytic sense. This situated stretching then can be multifaceted. And the stretching is ‘relational’, that is, we can only judge a stretch from relational understandings. Here our aim is then not to ground, to set, to normalize. It is to seek to ‘stretch’ beyond what we know, what we find intuitive. And we do not ‘ground’ in it, we think from it, and beyond it. And we recognize the limit of this knowledge. We ‘stretch’ beyond from our relational bounds to new understandings of relations, and then we continue to stretch some more. We stretch, but we don’t assume we can by so doing get to the ‘outside’ or that we can really ‘capture the truth’ from the inside. We are limited, multiplicitous, and related; uniquely so and yet in and of the relational universe. What does this mean for our conceptions of how we should ‘know’, or epistemology? A few further technical clarifications with regard to such ‘stretching’ are in order: on what stretching means for ‘abstraction’, ‘democracy and dialogue in knowing’, and for methods.
Abstraction In epistemological debates, abstraction has been and continues to be contested ground. While some argue that we should undo abstract categories and focus on observing practices, laws or behaviour, others argue we should ‘abstract’, conceptualize, pull beyond our immediate experiences. Recently the actor-network theorists and practice theorists, for example, argue that there is a need to get back down to earth and the relations we are immediately related in (practice theory, Adler and Pouliot, 2011; assemblages, Latour 2007; assemblage thinking in IR see e.g. Acuto and Curtis, 2014). Critical and scientific realists on the other hand have always argued for a stretching through abstraction, that is, using conceptual abstraction as a way out from the limited perceptual knowledge we work with (for a discussion of this debate see Joseph and Kurki, 2018). How does ‘stretchy’ situated knowledge relate to these debates? Does stretching mean refraining from use of abstract categories like patriarchy or capitalism, or does it mean precisely to stretch through abstraction? As I see it, it is not the upshot of this conception of stretchy situated knowledge to deny abstraction. In fact, we need abstractions; not only because many of our concepts ‘necessarily abstract’ in imaging relations (including the idea of ‘relations’), but also because abstraction can be one way in which we challenge our realisms. Abstractions translate the world but also, crucially, can also ‘queer’ the world as we understand it. Think of spacetime queering understandings of space
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and time, or the concept of a field queering our sense of how ‘forces’ work. Relationality both in its ubiquity and complexity demands abstraction, a pulling out from ‘our skin’, from our direct descriptions, feelings and intuitions to reasoning ‘out’ from them. For relational cosmologists, we need to, in order the re-approximate, stretch our conceptual horizons. In doing so we should ‘dare’ to abstract about the relational processes, interactions and dynamics we are involved in analysing. Yet, we should note that stretchy situated knowledge does not entail reductionist types of abstractions. As will be explored in the next chapter, stretchy situated knowledge may mean exploring relationalities beyond ‘levels’ we normally think through. There is nothing obvious about ‘social’, ‘chemical’, or ‘biological’ as levels of abstraction that we should work with. In fact, we can query beyond ‘self-evident’ disciplinary boundaries and their comfortable abstractions: the ‘social’, the ‘natural’. Abstraction does not entail the obvious ‘reproduction’ of ‘social’ science in isolation from ‘natural’ science. This may in fact be a misleading ‘realism’ we should try to pull away from, as I try to show in the next chapter.
Democracy, Science, and Situated Knowledge Another striking aspect of both the standpoint epistemology and relational cosmology is that they both bring together debates on democracy and science/ knowledge. For both perspectives, a democratization of knowledge is an essential part of a ‘good science’, for it allows the playing out of different perspectives, of different theories, of different ways of cutting up or putting together the world. Both perspectives are informed in this by the relational and situated understanding of knowledge; this is what necessitates democracy in science. But both approaches leave questions unanswered about science, democracy and knowledge. Standpoint epistemologies, while calling for democracy, do not focus enough on specifying what this democratization of knowledge entails; how it might be achieved, and what kind of a democracy we should reach for: a pluralistic liberal democracy where all views are heard or a participatory democracy where all views partake in political and social construction of democratic life? Smolin also leaves questions surrounding democracy rather open-ended: what it means for science to offer a model of democracy for society remains unspecified. What aspects of science provide this potential? Even more intriguing are the references to envisioning ‘the universe as something analogous to a community’ as part of the ‘parallel development of the projects of science and democracy’ (Smolin, 1997: 370). We will return to this subject later on in this book (ch. 7), as we examine democracy, from the relational cosmology perspective, but it is important to note
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here that what Smolin points to is ‘science’ and ‘democracy’ as related modes of organization of thought in a relational universe: both entail and require critical, open evaluation and dialogue of situated viewpoints, which provide us with ways of ‘relating’ to relations as well as a ‘pushing beyond’, a drive to ‘re-relate to relations’, with different words, concepts, feelings, sensibilities. We return to this theme in later chapters as we turn to relations and relating to relations. I suggest that we can have a better view of what this might mean or entail after we have clarified the kind of ontologies we might need to think through to think about democracy. In the meanwhile, a few final comments are in order on methods in the image of a stretchy situated knowledge governed by democratic ethos of plural situated knowledge and open disclosure of ideas.
Methods and Stretchy Situated Knowledge I would like to set the lightness of the new search for knowledge, which is based in the understanding that the world is a network of relations, that what was once thought to be absolute is always subject to evolution and renegotiation, that the complete truth about the world is not graspable as any single point of view, but only resides in the totality of several or many distinct views. (Smolin, 1997: 371–2) The core implication of Smolin’s idea of situated knowledge is that there is no one knowledge, no God’s eye perspective. There is no methodological point of view from which we can observe the world ‘from the outside’. Methodologically then, for science the challenge is to think through what this means. But perhaps more radically, for Smolin, there is not even such a thing as a ‘scientific method’ as classically conceived. What then can possibly be ‘methodologically’ the implications of this new lightness in the search for knowledge? It would seem that the implications are that we should be opportunistic about the methods we use. Indeed, following Smolin’s lead we should be open to the use of various methods. This is intriguing not just because it fits well with the postpositivist trends in social science but also because it concurs with scientific realism more generally: scientific realists, and critical realists in social science, argue that it is the nature of objects, or our questions about them, that define which methods we choose, which methods help us understand them. Yet there is also a somewhat different emphasis here, an even more anarchistic emphasis perhaps. Certainly, the stretchy situated knowledge approach which I have been developing out from Smolin would seem imply that we think on methods as something
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which follow conceptual knowledge. As Feynman (1955) puts it: once we have figured a new way of thinking about something, methods then are about finding a way to generate evidence as to whether this way of looking at something is reasonable or plausible. There is then, as Smolin too argues, no scientific method, in the sense of pre-prescribed methodologies one must follow. Instead, the ethos of science—being honest, being open, re-approximating—goes first and methodological choices follow. In this sense then there seems to be a deeply anti-positivist drive here, if indeed positivism is seen as a way of thinking science through a prescribed method. We need to instead by definition be flexible and open and innovative about methods, to match up our conceptual apparatuses—not just because of our ontological objects but because ‘we don’t know’ how best to conceptualize, let alone prove the existence of these ‘objects’. Second, with the stretchy situated knowledge in mind, we are, I would like to suggest, pushed to think of methods in an interesting new way: not as ways of even checking evidence, but also as a way of ‘pushing against’ our realisms. As Andrew Bennett for example has recently argued (Bennett, 2014), in many ways methods can be seen as ways of ‘checking us’, ‘pushing against our expectations’. This is how observational methods too can be useful, but they are better understood in the context of ‘stretchy situated knowledge’, for they do not necessarily entail a God’s eye view. In a sense, positivist orientations too can be ‘rescued’ via relational cosmology and situated knowledge.
Stretching in International Relations: A Brief Initial Comment The implications of this approach to situated knowledge for IR theory and thinking on what theory should do in the field are interesting. It warns us of our realisms and pushes IR theory ‘past’ positivism and towards critical theoretical perspectives. At a basic level, for me, this approach says that whenever I explain war through anarchy or self-interest or when I seek to explain dominance of liberal economic ideas by the construction of a global common sense in soft policy agendas like democracy promotion, our conceptual explanations are perhaps interesting and sensible to us but they are also of our realisms, they reproduce what appears sensible to us where we are.⁴ But as such do they explain? Relational cosmology suggests to me that we need to seriously think—as a condition of our situated knowing—not just about situating our own knowledge
⁴ Note here that what is realistic to each of us is relational. If there is no objective knowledge, if we are related, uniquely, then also our realisms are not fully shared. Nevertheless, the emphasis here is on the ethos of pushing, not on seeking universal absolute standards of what counts as realism and what counts as a stretch.
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in where we come from but about trying to stretch our concepts, away from how people think and how we think. We need to seek situated knowledge, try and process our knowledge as arising from the relations that we are in, ask questions about the relations we are in and others are in and construct dialogue around that. Yet, we must also do more, more than even standpoint epistemologists tell us: we need to also try and ‘stretch away’, conceptually, from the realisms that may and do structure our thoughts as well as our relations. To relate, to re-relate, to re-approximate to relations we are in and to which we have no ready access even as we are in them, we should also try and queer, unsettle, and push away from knowledges we have, from what seems sensible, reasonable. That we call for this kind of knowledge is a challenge to classical positivists, realists, liberal or Marxist IR theory, which claim that we can aspire to objective knowledge of international politics. If we have the right concepts, and relate them to facts, we can aspire to timeless truths, or at least socially relatively true truths about the society around us. The stretchy situated knowledge calls on you: when you think you have the truth, consider whether it is truth for a knower like you, positioned as you are! But if you already know this and go with the constructivists or feminists in regularly situating your knowledge, here too we have a challenge for you: instead of situating, try and stretch away from your conceptions, your situatedness. It is not enough to situate knowledge as constructivists do, nor necessarily to build strong objective frameworks around political struggles, we need to also question, catch ourselves and others in our common sense realisms. In emphasizing this relational cosmology sits much better with critical theory and poststructuralism which are two theoretical traditions, which helpfully get at this discomfort with concepts, inadequacy of concepts, and also the need to mess up concepts. Yet, even here there is a challenge: for the ‘anti-scientific’ tendencies in critical theories also need to be cast aside. This view comes from science and controversially scientists on this view can also point the way to re-approximations, reconceptualizations to us ‘social scientists’. The division of social and natural science, the protection of the uniqueness of the ‘social’ and the ‘natural’ is disrupted; and yet we still do not have a God’s eye view, universal scientific method or truths. As critical social theorists and IR theorists we can, helpfully, think with sciences, not just in opposition to them.
Conclusions The images which we construct of the universe live within us, in the space of our thoughts. Between these images . . . the reality of which we are a part, there exists countless filters: our ignorance, the limitations of our senses and of our intelligence . . . These conditions,
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nevertheless, are not, as Kant imagined, universal . . . They are a posteriori to the mental evolution of our species and are in continuous evolution. We not only learn but we also learn to gradually change our conceptual framework and to adapt it to what we learn . . . The images which we construct of the universe may live inside us, in conceptual space but they also describe more or less well the real world to which we belong’ (Rovelli, 2014: 65–6) This chapter has sought to explore and to advance the cause of cosmologically situated knowledge in social science. The reason it is interesting to explore these aspects, even after the many tracts of writing on social epistemology is that cosmological situatedness can speak, in sympathetic but also clarificatory ways, to current explorations of situated knowledge in the social sciences and IR. It can clarify some weaknesses in such frames and reorient, slightly, a (postpositivist form of) search for knowledge in IR. It has been my aim to argue that relational cosmology too asks us to ‘situate’ knowledge, just as many postpositivists and standpoint epistemologists have called for. Yet it also forces us to ask some critical questions as to how we situate, notably about how we ‘push on’, ‘stretch away’ from our situatedness. I have argued for the development of ‘stretchy situated knowledge’. This kind of knowledge does not simply provide us with solutions: it calls on us to have the courage to ‘abstract’ and to ‘pull away’ from what seems sensible to us in the conceptual systems which have made us. As the following chapters will seek to explore (indeed, they are attempts to ‘stretch’ situatedly from relational cosmology) this is crucial for our knowledge to be in a position to ‘relate’ and ‘re-relate’ to relations we are in, to re-approximate how we think as we process in a relational cosmos.
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5 Relations, Human and Non-human [I]n paintings of Picasso and the surrealists and abstract expressionists; in music of Stravinsky and Pert; in the dances of Martha Graham; in Wittgenstein’s anti-philosophy; in Godel’s theorem; in modern topology; in literature and theater, in molecular biology and the visions of Margulis and Lovelock . . . we see a great shift of where humans are looking to find and to create coherence and beauty in the world . . . And I hope I have convinced the reader that the signs of a great transition may be read nowhere more clearly than in the incomplete and unresolved state of our physical and cosmological theories. (Smolin, 1997: 367) We thought that we existed as unique beings, a race apart from the family of animals and plants and discovered that we are descendants of the same parents as every living thing around us. We have ancestors in common with butterflies and larches. We are like an only child who on growing up realizes that the world does not revolve around them alone, as they thought when little. They must learn to be one amongst others. (Rovelli, 2014: 65) We love to think we are special, but the history of science suggests otherwise. Now the anthropos, the human self, is coming under pressure. (Sagan, 2013: 18) This chapter, a key part of the story presented here, explores how we might re-imagine relations and relationality, and through them the ‘human’ and the ‘environment’, in light of relational cosmology. While conceptualizing the world through relations is no novelty for social sciences or International Relations scholarship, I propose that grasping relationality on the lines of relational cosmology may be more tricky than we think. Indeed, I propose we, inspired by relational cosmology, ‘stretch’ our relational vocabularies a little further. This is because to think relations without things, without backgrounds, without laws,
International Relations in a Relational Universe. Milja Kurki, Oxford University Press (2020). © Milja Kurki. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198850885.001.0001
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as multiplicities of relationalities relating clashes against the Newtonian cosmological background assumptions that still do surprising work in our conceptual frameworks. By being pushed to ‘enter’ the relational ‘mesh’, we are forced to abandon what feels comfortable: our commitments to ‘individuals’ and ‘things’ and IR’s commitments to things like ‘states’ interacting against background of ‘resources’ or ‘the environment’. And perhaps most crucially, thoroughgoing relational thinking also challenges the deep humanism—separation of the human and the social from the ‘natural’—that is so deeply embedded in social theory, IR theory, and also, intriguingly, even in Smolin’s work. Indeed, in this chapter I aim to take relational cosmology’s principles and extend them out to a new set of conversations with critical social theorists, various forms of critical and post-humanism and also decolonial thought. Indeed, it is suggested here that relational cosmology can extend the relational revolution Smolin sees unfolding and can also enter into a productive dialogue with existing forms of relational thought. In so doing it can help clarify the developments in relational social theory—and why relational social theory matters—and it can also learn from a dialogue with new forms of relational thought, in particular critical humanism, and thus extend its insights. Indeed, many of the key debates in the fields of philosophy, social theory, and also in IR theory already revolve around questions about relationality, how to theorize it, and also about the ‘extent’ of relevant relationalities. I argue here that relational cosmology helps us in part to explain the rise of relationality, but also allows us to open up new, less thing-like, less humanist, perhaps also less colonial, routes to rethink relations. In particular, it allows us, I argue, to re-relate to the ‘mesh’; the wider totality of relations which, however, always also ‘escape’ our conceptual capacities to describe them. Here then relations are emphatically not ‘interactions’ of individuals or things, nor ‘networks’ of nodes. Here relations are not between things and they are not to be thought of as existing against an ‘empty background’ of Newtonian cosmology. Instead, relations precede things and relations are ‘the mesh’ from which, in which, of which ‘things’ (insofar as it helps to speak in such terms) are made. And to think relations is to ‘think big’, and it is to ‘stretch’; not to think we must or can fully ‘capture’ relations ‘as a whole’. We are situated in relations, but we should also ‘re-relate’ to relations to (re-)approximate them. They are not transparent to us, even as we are in them, made of them. There is nothing easy, then, about thinking relationally. And yet this way of thinking also reorients us to ‘the world’, not least in opening up ‘more of it’ to relate to and to be concerned with (a conversation which we continue in chs. 6 and 7). In this relational world we come to reckon with not only non-humans but also the fact that humans, too, are
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‘made’ in the mesh of relationalities. As critical humanists, or often misunderstood posthumanists¹ argue, humanity is not a simple, stable category. Human as a universal marker is also made. And humans matter precisely because of how they are made and how making them also ‘makes others’, the ‘non-humans’. This chapter suggests that we should ‘wake up from our Newtonian slumber’ (Kavalski, 2012) in IR and social theory and that this waking up process is also linked to a more careful engagement with the human, the non-human, the social and the natural. I offer the exposition in four steps. First, to contextualize the discussion, I set out why thinking about scientific cosmology seriously does not entail what ‘pop-cosmology’ imaginations offer to us: a kind of a ‘lifting’ of our perspectives or imaginations ‘off’ the planet so as to allow humanity to overcome its petty differences. It is argued that the implications of seriously working through relational cosmology are much more serious and also more subtle: they entail a ‘stretchy’ kind of relating to relations we are in and of. To work out what relationality might mean, the second section asks: how should we think ‘relations’ and ‘relationality’? I discuss first existing forms of relational thought, arguing that they do not go far enough in the direction that relational cosmology points to. I then proceed to offer a vocabulary, through the help of relational cosmology but also Timothy Morton and Donna Haraway, to think through relations in a more extended sense. I try to give the reader a sense of the ‘mesh’ (Morton, 2010) of relational processing. The uneven and contorted topographies of the mesh call on us to be exposed to the wide and multiple relationalities which we process in and of but are often not aware of and lack the conceptual capacity to ‘capture’. The third section then offers commentary as to what this view of relations offers for specific debates in the social sciences: on the significance of rethinking the human and recognizing the non-human; on how to navigate the notion of emergence; on how we orient to ‘realism’ and to the notion of the pluriverse developed in decolonial thought. The final part of the chapter explores how we come back to International Relations from this view of relationality. It is argued that a study of various parasitic or symbiotic relationalities alongside, beyond and shooting through ‘international relations’ as classically conceived is desirable. This initial argument is drawn on in chapter 7 as I seek to develop a planetary reorientation to the subject matters of IR.
¹ Note: posthumanism does not mean ‘after human’ but thinking past humanisms which see humans as separate from nature. While many authors in this vein of thought use the term posthuman, this does not mean ignoring or bypassing the human but trying to understand how it emerges from relationalities. No thought in this vein is ‘post’-human in having moved beyond the human somehow. See e.g. Kaltoffen (2018)
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This chapter involves some difficult going, at times, for me as the author grappling for words to express an orientation that our concepts almost do not allow, and perhaps for the reader as they relate not only to this argument but hopefully also to the ‘world’ differently. Yet, I hope an orientation emerges which, in the spirit of ‘lightness’ and ‘stretchiness’ of knowledge construction aimed for here, allows us to ‘let go’ momentarily of questions like: What are relations? Which relations matter most? Or, what does this offer for IR? We will return to these questions in the latter part of this chapter and in chapters 6 and 7, but hopefully from ‘somewhere else’, a different kind of relational (dis)orientation.
Lifting the Gaze in a Human Universe? As I am writing this chapter, British astronaut Tim Peake made a successful journey to the International Space Station (ISS). This caused not only a great deal of nationalist fervour in the UK, but also wetted the eyes of many ‘cosmopolitans’ who watched the launch. The power of ‘humanity’ (in this case as a unitary imaginary whole) to push beyond the atmosphere is awesome, while also humbling, given the immense technological challenges it still involves and the considerable bravery that is required on the part of the volunteers to man the space missions. This event also provoked much discussion about the common future of humanity: the need to think about our common shared humanity in a big wide cosmos. This kind of discussion has many precedents. Nixon’s famous welcome to the moon explorers can be recalled for example: on their return Nixon congratulated them by specifically reminding them of the service that they had done, momentarily at least, to unite the world through reaching out beyond the planet. The ISS today stands, equally, as a reminder of a cross-nation endeavour by humanity to man space and to understand it better. It is precisely for this reason that many scientific cosmologists have been, for want of a better word, of a ‘cosmopolitan’ bent: while the space race of course is also tied to nationalist endeavours, many cosmologists tend to emphasize the power of space to unite us. The Earth Rise and the more recent Pale Blue Dot images bring home the loneliness of life on this planet in our region of the cosmos. The viewpoint of most physicists and cosmologists that venture to speak on human relations, Brian Cox or Carl Sagan for example, can be summarized as differing from the average set of beliefs in at least six ways. First, they tend to emphasize that we emerge from the cosmos, we are ‘emergent properties’, the most complex such, according to Cox, of the cosmos. Or, we are all ‘starstuff pondering the stars’ as Carl Sagan (1995 [1980 ]: 374) so evocatively, and memorably, put it. We must then perceive ourselves in the wider array of cosmic evolutionary patterns.
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Second, as Martin Rees (2004) emphasizes, the timescales on which cosmologists think about the world, about us in it, and about the future of life (which might not involve us, at least as we know) is different. For cosmologists, we must be able to also reflect on the cosmic timescales, as difficult as it is for short-lived processing organisms such as us. As we do ‘think beyond’ our timescales, third, we realize we are not at the centre of the universe. We have been ‘demoted’ and we are rather alone (Cox and Cohen, 2014: 4). No one other than us will save us, for we can’t see any sign of God(s) and there do not appear to be any aliens nearby to come to our assistance either. As Cox puts it: ‘Humans represent an isolated island of meaning in a meaningless Universe’ (Cox and Cohen, 2014 : 4). While this demotion ‘lays bare deeply held prejudices and comfortable assumptions’ (Cox and Cohen, 2014: 4), the outcome of this view is also, intriguingly, rather comforting, for in our role as sole meaning-makers emergent from the meaninglessness of the universe, we also emerge as rather special. We emerge as the most complex form of intelligence, and come to realize that we are in charge of ourselves, and the planet, in an ‘empty’ universe. As Rees (2004: 188) puts it, ‘a cosmic perspective strengthens the imperative to cherish this pale blue dot’. Or in Sagan’s words: ‘our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth’ (Sagan, 1995 [1980]: 374). To protect the planet we must change our ways, our ways of thinking and learn to ‘put things right’. How, is not entirely clear, but an important call for such ‘stepping up’ of Man is present in much of the ‘popular cosmology’. Fourth, this makes many cosmologists rather more open to changes in society than most. Indeed, they tend to be against conservative forces, especially those forces which see our human institutions as a final endpoint: on the cosmic timescales the likelihood of our life having anything to do with endpoints becomes rather difficult to entertain. Fifth, it is interesting to note that there is a critique of religion implicit in much of today’s cosmological thinking, de Chardin (1959) notwithstanding. (Physical) science is our best, most humble, and modest friend. It is the perfection of rational capacities of Man and must not be undone by ‘religious dogma’, even as theological questions do also arise from, or are implicated in, the kinds of questions about the meaningfulness of human life that popular cosmologists raise. Crucially, sixth, when it comes to thinking about ‘international relations’, most physicists perceive the violence and strife between nations as meaningless. As Brian Cox nicely summarizes the predominant sentiment: A small planet such as Earth cannot continue to support an expanding and flourishing civilization without a major change in the way we view ourselves. The division into hundreds of cultures whose borders and interests are defined by imagined local differences and arbitrary religious dogma, both of which are
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utterly irrelevant and meaningless on a galactic scale, must surely be addressed if we are to confront global problems such as mutually assured destruction, asteroid threats, climate change, pandemic diseases. (Cox and Cohen, 2014: 114)
An overcoming of petty differences amongst human populations is to be the outcome of a cosmological vision of ‘the human universe’. This overcoming is recognized of course to be difficult: indeed, a certain pessimism also arises from the recognition of the ‘stupidity’ of petty humans. As Cox powerfully puts it: ‘The very fact that the preceding sentence (quote above) sounds hopelessly utopian might provide a plausible answer to the Great Silence in the Universe’ (Cox and Cohen, 2014: 115). Despite the pessimism about our civilization’s capacity to ‘make it’, there is an effort to ‘lift’ the gaze of the human race to see its challenges in a wider context. These are all important sets of reflections, and I agree with the impetus apparent in this way of ‘challenging’ how humanity thinks by placing humans in the cosmos. Yet, I believe that there is room to think further about what a cosmic perspective might entail. Indeed, there are some dangers to be watched out for in ‘popular cosmology’. These emerge more clearly from a careful exploration of the insights of relational cosmology. Indeed, the relational cosmology perspective, I argue here, should not be interpreted to be about seeing us as ‘special human subjects’ created out of the accidents of the cosmos; human agents called upon to correct their own and others’ ways in order to survive in the ‘cold’ cosmos. A less (secularly) theological and more related—rather than ‘lifted’—view is needed. And we must also note how in the above accounts a singular unproblematized humanity emerges comfortably, too comfortably, from the cosmotropes. This hides three significant considerations: 1) that humanity as an abstract singular fiction also creates the non-human as a category of significance and difference; 2) that not all humans have always been or still are considered ‘equally human’ or human in the same way; that culturally specific ideas of humanity— ‘white, male, and of European descent’ (Fishel, 2017: 102) have also created the sub- or not-quite- humans to be corrected, taught, disciplined, or erased through colonial interventions or through family patriarchs; 3) that being specifically and only ‘human’ is not what matters to all ‘humans’ equally; as unfathomable as it seems to European humanists, not all ‘humans’ deem themselves universal ‘only-humans’ but have also varied relations beyond ‘humans’ (see e.g. Kohn, 2013; Querejazu, 2016). Below then I try to develop a cosmological language which challenges the popular cosmotropes. I argue that if relations are fundamental, as relational
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cosmology suggests, and if we do not have God’s eye views of the planet, or the cosmos, then the challenge of relationally attuned thinking should be not to lift the human to the cosmos but to bring the cosmic relationalities to bear on how we think and act, as ‘humans’ too. From relational cosmology I develop a perspective which is not a ‘love letter to humanity’ (Cox and Cohen, 2014, preface) but nor is it ‘anti-human’ or even anti-humanist. I argue for critical engagement with how we are made in relations, human and non-human; a re-relating to the mesh of relationalities we find so convenient to ignore as we seek the comfort of a ‘lifted’ human perspective.
Relational Revolution and Rethinking Relations Lee Smolin, as we have seen in chapter 3, argues that there is a revolution of relational thinking on its way in the world. As we try and get our heads around what relativity theory and quantum physics, and the findings of chemistry and biological sciences, tell us, we move away, slowly but gradually, from God’s eye perspectives and (openly) theological conceptions of the cosmos. In this context it is not irrelevant to note that one of the striking aspects of twentieth-century social theory, too, has been the rise of relational thinking of various kinds. Liberalism, the key ideological orientation of Western enlightenment thought—and a key inheritor of a Newtonian view where society consists of atomist individuals moving, self-willed, against backgrounds, interacting in ways which we can hope to study through systematic observation and thus control (via institutions)—has faced much criticism in recent decades. Against the once radical emancipatory ideology of liberalism critics cry: humans are not like atoms! Their thoughts, feelings, actions, and concepts are structured in social relations, argue Marxists, constructivists, critical theorists, and many other strands of social theory. If Smolin is right, the inextricable ‘rise’ of relational thinking in the social sciences is quite possibly part of this unfolding relational revolution. But how should we think on relations? Is current relational social theory in line with Smolin’s challenge to how we should think relations: without things, backgrounds, as processing change and novelty, as open, contingent? This is an important question, for a great deal is at stake in how we think relations. If we are all relationalists, why do we still see the world in such different ways? As Martin Coward (2017) rightly points out, much is at stake in what metaphors we think relations through. This is the case not just because even the old liberal atomists today like to think in terms of relations of a kind—networks—but also because it is only by recognizing this that we can see the contestation in, and limits of, current relational thought in critical social theory.
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Relational Social Theory Relational thinking at its core is seeking to challenge atomist and individualist traditions of thought in social theory. Relational social theory has sought to take on the ‘atomist’ ways of thinking about ‘objects’ in natural and social worlds. Core focus has been classically on undoing the autonomous, rational individual—the ‘hero’ of liberal social and political theory. Critiques of liberalism have been the ‘bread and butter’ of relational forms of thought. If liberalism was built on the notion of individuals, separate and discrete, rational and autonomous, and this liberal view, as we have suggested before via Foley in chapter 1, is classically Newtonian, relational theorists have argued against this autonomist view: for them individuals are instead embedded in society, in economy, in discourse, in social structures which ‘make’ them. Agency exists in the context of structure. A key relational intervention was of course Marx’s social theory, from which many of today’s relational social theories also emanate. For Marx humans are embedded in relations with each other but also in relations with the natural world (Foster, 2000). Humans are made in their relations: they do not emerge from God’s will or universal rational design. They are made by relations they are in and of. It is these relations then we need to understand. Most crucially for Marx, we need to understand the unseen social relations our everyday patterns of life make very difficult for us to see: relations of production. The reasons we do not see the, now predominantly capitalist, relations of production, which structure our actions, identities, and prospects lie in the constitution of the structure. The (super)structure blinds us to the relations we are actually in. Our embeddedness in certain types of relations creates particular types of knowledge and can blind our knowledge of the relations we are in and of. The challenge for Marx then was: How do we escape from the confines of liberal and mechanistic thought to see the underlying relations which tie together, which constitute us? While Marxists of various kinds explored these notions through the course of the twentieth century, so have many other strands of thought which developed Marx’s relational challenge further. A set of important interventions in this regard arose from critical theory. At the heart of the varied tradition of critical theorizing, which was motivated by Marx but sought to develop his insights in new, theoretically as well as politically powerful, directions has always been relational thinking. Whether it is Gramscian thought on ideological hegemony in the social world, Frankfurt School critiques of instrumental rationality and positivism, radical feminist critiques of liberal equality-feminisms, or Foucauldian critiques of governmentality, the emphasis of critical theorizing has been on critique of the notion that we can analyse the world around us as if it existed ‘distinct’ from our conceptions of it and as if it was characterized by ‘essences’: sets of characteristics ‘natural’ to the world.
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As Marx warned, those things that look most natural and ‘essential’ to us are often the ones that have been most meticulously constructed so to appear. And they have been constructed to appear in certain ways so as to stop us from questioning the kinds of structures of relations they may be underpinned by. The fixidity, lawlikeness, and the stability of the (natural and social) world around us may be a legacy of modern enlightenment thinking but it may also be deeply illusory. And it may serve the agendas of some over others. In their investigations, various disagreements have emerged between critical theorists, not just in terms of the ‘depth’ of relations they seek to identify as ‘explanations’ for social behaviour and action but also to do with their conceptualizations of the materiality of relations.² Fiercely contested debates have revolved around how to theorize relations; which kinds of relations (class, race, gender) matter more; and what the implications politically are of different relational conceptions of the world (e.g. discursive vs material). Equally feisty debates have surrounded the agency–structure debate: which, marginally, matters more, structure or agency, and how do they cause or constitute each other? Should we go with constructivist vision of co-constitution, Giddensian constructionism, Archer’s morphogenesis of agents and structures, or another vision altogether? As important as these relationalisms, and relational debates, have been for social theory and philosophy of social science, they are also delimited in certain ways. Specifically, they seem delimited in two main ways. First, in these debates, it is note-worthy that ‘thing-language’ is far from absent. In fact, various ‘substances’—from agents to structures, ideas to matter—‘interact’ it seems in much of relational social theory. In agency–structure debates, for example, it is precisely because one ‘thing’—agent or structure—‘causally’ affects the other that they are deemed ‘separate’ even if only analytically. It is because they ‘co-constitute’ each other that they appear as ‘two’ things, and indeed, as I have argued in my previous works, two different ‘kinds’ of things, which cause in different senses (Kurki, 2008). Thus, if the role of ‘things’ as the basis of ‘interactional’ relations is more obvious in liberal frameworks, or network thinking, this is not the end of ‘thing’-language’s reach. Even in critical realism, a key advocate and developer of more thoroughgoing relational thinking, social relations are arguably still understood as relations of ‘thing-like objects’, agents, and as such constitute themselves ‘related wholes’ which can causally shape agents (as in the morphogenetic approach, Archer, 1995; on related wholes, see e.g. Kurki, 2008). We must
² While some critical thinkers hold on to the possibility of autonomy and emancipation from relational contexts, others argue that so bound are we in relations that there is no ‘individual’ that can emerge from them that we can ‘save’. Equally, while Marxists argue that materiality is essential to the relations in which we are bound, poststructuralists and many critical theorists argue that it is ‘ideational’ or ‘discursive’ relations which define our modes of existence.
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then be wary of the effects of thing-thinking even in relational social theory (figures 1–3 illustrate some of these imaginings of relations). Second, we should note another foundational limitation in much of postMarxist relational thought: the dominance of a pervasive ‘humanist limit’ to how relations are thought about and what relations ‘matter’. Bruno Latour, some 150 years after Marx, argues that despite relational social theory’s intricate theorizations of social relations, we still do not understand our relations in the world. Why? Because, for him, the ‘social theories’ following Marx like to postulate the existence of abstract ‘social’ categories which lead us to misunderstand our direct living in and through assemblages human and non-human (Latour, 2007). We are in the world, for Latour (1999; 2010), not outside it ‘looking in’. Our relations are direct, felt, lived in, not mediated by abstract concepts as philosophy and social theory would have us believe. This has important consequences for how we relate to thinking about our ‘social relations’ for Latour, for in a sense our notions of ‘social relations’ mediate our attachments, precisely in the ways which tend to ‘detach’ us from the relations in the world.
Figure 1. Things in network ‘relations’ à la ‘relational’ liberalism; we trace connections and inter-actions of actors, conceived as ‘nodes’
Individual
Individual
Social structure
Figure 2. Things making up social structure, a different ‘kind of a thing’
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Agency - practices
Social structure - conditions
M
Ef Fi
Fo
Figure 3. My own imaging of relations of agential causation and social structural causation (redrawn from Kurki, 2008)
Latour’s insight is profound; for we arguably should not ignore the ‘humanist’ limit—and the simultaneous creation of ‘nature’—which emerges from relational social theory itself. Indeed, following Latour, a new important type of relationality has arisen in the social sciences, including IR, in recent years: a critical or post-humanist relational thinking (for a useful survey see Kaltoffen, 2017; 2018. See also Hobden and Cudworth 2011, 2013). These lines of thought aim not so much to undo or reject the human but rather to ‘dissent from certain elements of humanism’ (Cudworth and Hobden, 2017: 8). Humanism here is understood as a tradition of thought, or an ideology, which sees humanity as a unified, unique, uniquely ‘able’ (reasonable, moral) species that stands apart from interspecies interdependencies (for a discussion see Cudworth and Hobden, 2017: 8) and as such can provide a focal point for ‘human and social sciences’ that can be studied in relative isolation. The post-/critical humanists challenge us not to reify ‘the social’ and the ‘natural’ as if they were ‘obvious’ layers of existence but to think beyond them. Indeed, they see human and non-human as tied together: ‘in order to understand the social world we need to accept that it is embedded and intersected by the non-human’ (Cudworth, Hobden, and Kavalski, 2018a: 4). Crucially, the aim of critical or post-humanists is not to say we need not ‘care’ about the ‘humans’. Rather it is to think again about how our humanity has come to be, and how it ‘collaborates’ (Tsing, 2015) with the world at large (beyond the human). Indeed, instead of focusing solely on thinking about what we ‘are’, posthumanism is, for Braidotti for example, about understanding ‘our’ becomings: ‘becoming-animal’, that is, developing trans-species solidarity, ‘becoming earth’, that is, developing understanding of our ecology, and ‘becoming machine’, ‘cracking open the division between humans and technological circuits’ (Braidotti, 2013: 67). And it is about recognizing the relevance and the making of the ‘non-human’ through our conceptions and practices of humanity. This provocation to critical relational thought is important in light of relational cosmology in my view for two reasons. First, because Smolin did not consider it a part of his elaboration of the significance of relational cosmology for ‘social’ and
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‘political’ life. We see in Smolin’s account a certain reluctance to ‘follow up’ the logic of relational unfolding which he postulates: while he embeds humans in Nature, his account is premised on a rather uncomfortable reification of ‘Nature’ and thus also ‘human’, ‘social’, and ‘political’ as categories. This is a particularly significant omission because, second, arguably relational cosmology’s core principles in fact push towards a post/critical humanist framework: in its emphasis on thoroughgoing relationality and cosmic processing in a wide variety of relations; in its emphasis on critique of arbitrary divisions of nature and society and social and natural sciences; and in its emphasis on building new ‘communities’ in the cosmos by re-relating to relations. I will then seek, in what follows, to translate relational cosmology’s insights in the context of critical humanism and thus to extend its ‘logic’. However, even as I will argue that critical and post-humanist thinking can help us understand relational cosmology insights; it should also be noted that such relational thinking has a problem (by our terms) of its own vis-à-vis relational cosmology. Paradoxically, some post- and critical humanists have been surprisingly taken by ‘thing’-language. Thus, Latour for example, thinks in terms of assemblages of thing-like actants. And new materialists and speculative realists of various descriptions (see e.g. Bryant, Srnicek, and Harman, 2011; Gratton, 2014) seek to save the independence of things in the world. The advocates of object-oriented ontology (OOO) for example ‘attempt to think an object for-itself that isn’t an object for the gaze of a subject, representation or cultural discourse’ (Bryant, 2011: 19). Arguably this new realism, ironically not particularly wellinformed by other forms of philosophical realism such as critical realism (Assiter, 2013), seeks not only to turn back to arguments about independence and autonomy of reality but also battles against excessive relationalisms, to save the autonomy of ‘objects’, ‘things’. Our challenge is then: can we reconstruct relational thought in such a way as to avoid both the attraction of thing-language and the draw of (uncritical) humanism, simultaneously? Below I try to construct, with the assistance from Morton and Haraway in particular, a vocabulary for how we might try to ‘stretch’ to understand relations in such a way. This means, however, giving up on some long-held and comfortable beliefs we might have about ‘relations’. As we will see, in rethinking relations in the ways suggested below, we are also led to a conversation in IR on the human and non-human and also careful consideration of the importance of postcolonial, decolonial and global IR. Indeed, while developed from different starting points the relational thought around multiple worlds (Agathangelou and Ling, 2009), worlding (Blaney and Tickner, 2017), the pluriverse (Querejazu, 2016), relational theory (Qin, 2016; Kavalski, 2018), and deep relations (Shilliam, 2015) all converse in interesting (if not completely straightforward) ways with the critique of relational social theory developed here. We return to this conversation in a later section.
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Reorienting to Relations Ontologically, the key challenge set by Smolin is that we should avoid lapsing to object/thing language—in the natural sciences and beyond it. His ‘natural philosophy’ seeks to redirect how we conceptualize the cosmos around us: he challenges us to focus on thinking relationally in a ‘thoroughgoing way’. This is difficult of course—he admits—because ‘thing’-language is deeply embedded in our vocabularies, in science, and in society, often entirely implicitly. In our everyday language, in our everyday lives, we do not stop to think how ‘everything’ (sic) is defined by the assumption that there are things and backgrounds, even as physical science theories have ‘done away’ with this frame of reference some time ago. Thing-language then persists and causes confusions, in physics, in natural science and also in the social sciences. Its role is clear in atomistic frameworks of self-willed individuals and autonomous decision makers of the liberal rationalists: negotiating, pressuring or balancing in equilibria, individuals ‘interact’ as things and yet come away from the ‘interactions’ essentially ‘the same’, as autonomous ‘things’. Nodes in networks of the network theorists still evoke thing-like ‘individuals’ interacting (for Coward’s excellent critique of network thinking see Coward 2017.) And even relational social theorists find it hard to move away from substances even as they try to theorize ‘social relations’. The persistence of thinglanguage reflects the inadvertent hold Newtonian background dependence and thingification of the world has on us. Are alternative ways of thinking possible, for if there are, ‘different metaphors, with different entailment of relations . . . ,[may] afford more desirable ethical and political consequences’ (Coward, 2017: 19)?
Thoroughgoing Relationality: The Mesh One way in which to imagine relationality without things is through appreciating what Timothy Morton has called ‘the mesh’. The mesh is the universe of relations, relationalities, unfoldings of them within which we process in a relational universe. This relational mesh makes us but also ‘exceeds us’ and constitutes the totality of relations, which are all in relations of their own in the mesh. Nothing in the mesh is the ‘same’ even as it is all in relations. This is because unfolding of relations and relational interactions is unique relationally. This mesh is the subject matter of what Morton (perhaps confusingly for those used to thinking through classical systemic paradigms of ecology) calls ‘ecological thought’. Interestingly, ecological thought comes very close, in my mind, to the sensibility which Smolin tries to capture with relational cosmology. For Timothy
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Morton, ecological thought has as its aim to get at the sense of the relationality, the totality, and interconnectivity³ of the mesh. For him, ecology is not a ‘way of managing environment’, a way of thinking Nature, but rather a different orientation to the world (or universe): ‘The ecological thought is the thinking of interconnectedness’ (Morton, 2010: 7). Crucially, this inter (or intra)-connection is not just ‘in the mind’. Rather ‘[i]t’s a practice and a process of becoming fully aware of how human beings are connected with other beings—animal, vegetable and mineral’ (Morton, 2010: 7). Ecological thinking is then not about being ‘embedded’ in the world, for such a notion too would reflect a kind of separation from the world as a ‘background’. Instead, ecological thought is ‘radical intimacy, coexistence with other beings, sentient or otherwise’ (Morton, 2010: 8). Thinking ecologically is about ‘becoming open, radically open—open forever, without the possibility of closing again’ (Morton, 2010: 8). The mesh, for me, is a useful metaphor for thinking on the kind of thoroughgoing relationality that relational cosmologists too try to get us to think on, for the mesh is dynamic, and it is ‘infinite in size and in detail’ (Morton, 2010: 30). And, crucially, in the mesh because everything relates dynamically, across scales ‘nothing exists all by itself, and so nothing is fully “itself ” ’ (Morton, 2010: 15). In a relational universe everything is then ‘made together’, no matter where we ‘start’ in the mesh. And interconnections in the mesh are not merely ‘interactive’ or indeed ‘interconnected’ but rather, as Karen Barad, puts it can be thought of as ‘intra-active’.
Intra-action Barad’s notion of intra-action, while developed in the context of a slightly different orientation, is useful for us and captures something important about how we should think about relations ‘relating’ in the mesh. This is because the notion of intra-action allows us to get away from, or stretch away from, the notion of interaction, a notion which presumes, or requires, thing-like objects. The language of inter-action paradoxically informs even the metaphorical tropes of Morton’s language (inter-connectivity) and also Smolin’s phrasings (‘dynamic interactions of relations’). Yet, Barad’s notion of intra-action moves us away from relations of things by emphasizing the notion of thoroughgoing relationality of all being and becoming in the mesh. For Barad, instead of ‘us’ or ‘things’ ‘inter-acting’, ‘we’ in fact are constantly in relational ‘intra-actions’ in the world, or rather are, as such, ‘of’ the relations in the ³ I find the notion of Barad’s intra-action a more helpful notion than interconnectivity, which implies things.
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cosmos. We then ‘process’ ourselves through the intra-actions in relations. In this way all our concepts, including reality, causality, or the social, are all part of that intra-action; they are not external to it, to us, or the world. And it is not just us, but—in an echo of Smolin’s arguments—also space and time that arise from those intra-actions. This is what Barad calls phenomena: ‘phenomena are . . . differential patterns of mattering’, or ‘diffraction patterns’ (Barad, 2007: 206). Our knowledge and practices bring matter to an intra-action. And these intra-actions ‘do not act in isolation . . . but rather engage in mutual intra-actions ‘with’ one another’ (Barad, 2007: 211). In the mesh then interactions are always more like intra-actions because ‘things’ are not distinct, because relations shoot through and flow through ‘things’. In relationality no thing—a ‘pen’ or a ‘Milja’—exists ‘as such’ but are made processually through relations; the relations of proton masses and gravitational fields, and equally the ‘shared’ ‘social’ norms of penhood and personhood. But the ‘things’ are not really ‘natural’ or ‘social’. Nor are they ‘things’ as such. They exist through relations, and relations, crucially, not of things but relations. It is this sense of relationality which Rovelli implies when he relates the sense of connectedness through language of information sharing: ‘all things are continually interacting with each other and in doing so each bears the traces of that with which it has interacted: and in this sense all things continuously exchange information about each other’ (Rovelli, 2014: 68).
Porous Strangers in Symbiotic Worlds In this mesh—when we realize we live in the mesh—Morton insists (2010: 15) that ‘[o]ur encounter with other beings becomes profound. They are strange, even intrinsically strange.’ And ‘[g]etting to know them makes them strange’. Indeed ‘[t]he ecological thought imagines a multitude of entangled strange strangers.’ Our cohabitants are strange in part because it is always difficult to ‘capture’ them in their ‘essence’, but more fundamentally, because strange strangers in relations, including ourselves, are always ‘porous’, they do not exist ‘on their own’. Relating to these strange strangers, relationally bound with us and yet not completely separate others either, is as tricky as it is interesting. ‘They’ process like we do in porous varied topography of relations relating. And their boundaries are porous: neither ‘they’, nor ‘us’, have firm ‘lines around us’ as relationalities shoot through ‘us’, process ‘us’. Donna Haraway helps us here: in ‘breaking apart’ things, and also in pointing to how this relates the human and the non-human in their intra-action in the mesh. Like Smolin and Morton, Haraway too wants to resist the urge to think relations as relations of things. She suggests we think in terms of multiplicities of relationalities and that in so doing we think through the idea of sympoiesis, symbiotic becoming.
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In a world of symbionts, for her, there are always lots of connections, relations relating. Yet, these are not relations of ‘discrete’ thing-like things; symbionts exist, become, process ‘porously’, in between, in relations. We are sceptical of ‘isolating’ systems and instead remain open and curious about their relational boundness with the universe of ‘smeared relationalities’ or ‘non-equilibrium’ systems. Indeed, interestingly Haraway comes to challenge the idea of autopoiesis—the idea of self-regulating beings—which has been attractive even in relational and post/critical humanist thought (and arguably also informs Smolin’s thinking at times as noted in chapter 3). Haraway argues that even as the image of selfregulating systems and things predominates in even much relational thinking— think of Earth as self-regulating or galaxies as self-regulating—for Haraway we are in fact ‘collectively producing systems that do not have self-defined spatial and temporal boundaries. Information and control are distributed among components’ (Dempster quoted by Haraway, 2016: 33). Unlike autopoiesis, symbiosis then entails porosity, connection, complex multiple relatings. And, she reminds us that in fact it seems that ‘many systems are mistaken for autopoetic’ when they ‘are really sympoetic’ (Haraway, 2016: 33). Think of the ‘human’, for example: ‘it’ lacks clear lines around it; is genetically multiple, includes millions of others symbiotically embedded within and around its processing (bacteria, viruses, fungi); is ‘made’ also by relations with animals and plants it consumes; and is constructed in its relations with other ‘humans’ and ‘non-humans’. ‘The human’, which has never been as singular as it has been made to seem recently—during the imagined glorious history of humanity—is porous and made of multiple relationalities (including power relations) understood only through its varied intersecting processings historically and presently. ‘We’ are (made from) a ‘medley’ (Sagan, 2013). Such orientation to relations via symbionts is useful for it challenges further the temptation to lapse back to things. Things are not really thing-like because everything in relations is porous, smeared. As Haraway powerfully states: If it is true that neither biology nor philosophy any longer supports the notion of independent organisms in environments, that is, interacting units plus contexts/ rules [which she argues they do], then sympoesis is the name of the game in spades. Bounded (or neoliberal) individualism amended by autopoeisis is not good enough figuratively or scientifically; it misleads us down deadly paths. (Haraway, 2016: 33)
Since we are of the relations, we must resist the urge to see ‘things’ even as selfreproducing’; we should instead pay attention to the ways in which all ‘things’ are in relations and are produced through relationalities not ‘self-ness’. And as such, we cannot draw lines between ‘things’. ‘Things’—humans, animals, plants—are
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porous and processing porously. ‘Critters do not precede their relatings, they make each other through semiotic material involution, out of beings of previous such entanglements’ (Haraway, 2016: 60). To be in relations is thus to think through the multiple relations that ‘shoot through’ ‘objects’, ‘structures’, ‘knowledge’, ‘language’, ‘ethics’. And relations are not ‘lines’ of dependence, or ‘conditions’ (backgrounds) but relations that make up intra-acting being/knowing/processing. And ‘beings’ do not have firm lines, because they are porous. They negotiate and re-relate as they unfold in their relational relatings. Nothing here is fixed, essential, grounded, basic. Novelty emerges from relations relating anew in the history of relations. Relationalities are smeared across us and across other ‘things’. And we smear relations by relating relations.
Re-relating in the Mesh Does this mean that we are everything and everything there is is relations? Is this some sort of a New Age philosophy (as I have been asked on occasion)? And can this kind of ‘holism’, or even ‘totalitarianism’ (as one commentator called it), about relations really help us to think through our specific predicaments in the cosmos? The aim here is not to postulate a cosmic unity or wholeness; but rather to open us up to the possibility of multiple relationalities, which may be difficult to grasp. The aim here is to step away from thing-language, difficult as it is, and open us and the world up to ‘relations’ and ‘re-relating’ to them. Morton clarifies what this involves: the process of what he calls ‘thinking big’, a process that has been damaged by modern science and epistemology. What is this thinking big? Crucially, ‘[t]hinking big does not mean that we put everything in a big box’, that we pool together the ‘humans’, and the ‘animals’ and chemistry and biology and physics and then think the world together with all these ‘disciplines’ and ‘objects’ in a big ‘box’. Rather, ‘thinking big means that the box melts into nothing in our hands’ (Morton, 2010: 31). Thus, like Smolin, Morton emphasizes that we should try to hold things together more: the ‘sciences’ (whether physics, sociology, or IR) should not only narrow down and focus on their own ‘objects’ but also recognize that their objects are porous, intra-related and as such all sciences ‘intra-related’ study of relations. On some level ‘all the boxes’ melt into the air when we try to understand relations. This is why, for Morton—akin to our stretchy situated knowledge explicated in chapter 4—‘ecological thought is intrinsically queer’ (Morton, 2010: 18). It certainly does not entail ‘the fascist . . . location, location, location’ (in disciplines, levels, layers, objects) but rather calls for the opposite: ‘dislocation, dislocation, dislocation’ (Morton, 2010: 28). We are never ‘at home’ in the mesh, knowledgeable
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of the whole, capturing the whole; or even quite aware of ‘where we are’ in it. We are moving, uncertain, open, porous, re-relating in the mesh. When we are in the mesh, always complexly related in the mesh, it is also not irrelevant how we relate to the mesh. Indeed, an important ethical and political question in the mesh is how are we oriented, committed in the mesh. As we live in the mesh, we also relate relations in the mesh. How we do so matters for relations in the mesh, for how we ‘commit’ to strange strangers. In the mesh, as we re-relate, ‘we’ also change: to quote Barry’s words (2013: 414) we ‘[mutate] as [we] enter into, or [are] enrolled or mobilized into, a field of relations’. In the mesh then we should ‘think big’, ‘relate’, ‘re-relate’, ‘mutate’, ‘dislocate’. It is difficult to live in the mesh, or it is a limited way to live in the mesh, when we ‘isolate’, ‘define’, ‘locate’, ‘fix’. *
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But, you might be shouting, what is this ‘relation’ or relationality you keep referring to! We still don’t know what relations and relationality are, in their essence! Unfortunately, it is hard to express relations and relationality in ‘substantialist’ terms: relations are not ‘its’; they are intra-connections, and they extend far and wide. We lack the words, even despite the help of Morton, Barad, and Haraway, to fully express relationality without things. Relations are everywhere in that ‘everything’ is made of multiple relations and every ‘thing’ in relations is situated in them quite specifically. Relations of various kinds ‘shoot through’ ‘things’ and ‘levels’ we imagine to fix them (e.g. biological, social, economic). Relations are of ‘the mesh’, the totality of intra-connectivity, which make up processes of becoming. Does this mean we need to account for everything in the world, all the time, to account for anything else? No. I am not arguing that all relations matter all the time or must be accounted all the time by relational ‘beings’—we could not even if we wanted to. Which relations we focus on and approximate to is, in part, a question of how we relate and wish to re-relate to relations. And such questions are also ‘ethical’ (as we will see in chapter 6). Indeed, how we relate to relations and relate relations matters intensely for the world we ‘make’ possible. This causes problems of its own for us: but ultimately dealing with these problems may be more helpful than refusing to confront the problem that our universe is not one that comes in ‘parts’ (Smolin 1997: 38) but is one where things and properties arise from relations (Smolin 1997: 21). As Hodgson warned us, the trouble with words is that words often, when thought is stretched, acquire different meanings. Relations is a word which has certain intuitive meanings and it is this word that relational cosmologists and relational social theorists have put forward for us to think with; yet thinking
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through relations is not easy, for within relational imaginations I have been pushing towards here we cannot think through relations ‘as we used to’. Relations in a relational universe are not relations as we knew them in the Newtonian universe of things: here there is no background to things and there is no empty configuration space in which we place things.
Relations More than Human? I hope the above discussion gives a sense of how we might think relations and also of what the difficulties are in thinking relationally, at least from our perspective. But how does this view of relations contribute to existing positions in relational social theory? A few points are worth emphasizing.
Relations Past the Human We are in and of the relations, nonhuman, and part of them. Our bodies, and brains, and concepts, have evolved in the context of the earth and its complex ecologies and are part of it. Like plants learned to carry themselves across land, the ‘spacecraft’ of our bodies are at once glorious crafts carrying us across dry land and cyborg extensions of our soft and slippery inner core . . . (Sagan, 2013: 45) As the reader might surmise, different, new ways of relating to humans, and nonhumans, emerge from this view. Implied in relational cosmology, although not explored in detail by Smolin, could be a conception of the world perceived in line with a more critical humanist vision of relations where we become aware of how humanity comes to be and how we make it in relations, ‘human’ and ‘nonhuman’. Relational cosmology, as translated here, challenges not only Newtonian attraction to things and backgrounds but also the ‘species solipsism’ (Mitchell, 2017: 14), the separation of the ‘human’ from relations which make, process, humans (and as such non-humans). For some time analysts across the humanities and natural sciences have emphasized the interconnections of human and non-human. For example, Jared Diamond’s accounts of Guns, Germs and Steel (1997), Linden’s analysis of weather undoing civilizations (2006) or Lent’s analysis of materially embedded cultural patterns (2017) all point to the need to think the non-human as part of societal development. But the account here goes further than these kinds of explorations by emphasizing that the interconnections of natural and social factors are not straightforwardly ‘causal’—say, geographical factors affecting social
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development (Diamond), biological processes affecting cultural patterns (Lent) or climate conditions affecting civilizational stability (Linden). Here relationalities are fundamentally complex and cross-cutting, so much so that tracking causality of ‘factors’ becomes a difficult notion (Cudworth and Hobden, 2013a: 648). We are here in the world of complex open systems. Relational cosmology translated through critical humanism thus ‘smears’ the human, smears the social and smears the ‘natural’ as ‘background’. As Dorion Sagan puts it (2013: 19), we must recognize that What we call ‘human’ is . . . impure, laced with germs . . . we literally come from messmates and morphed diseases, organisms that ate and did not digest one another, and organisms that infected one another and killed each other and formed biochemical truces and merged.
Relational cosmology as translated here then shares the critical humanist concern with negotiations of a much more complex reality of ‘us’ and the ‘natural world’. If ‘natural scientists’ studied the world ‘out there’ and humanists ‘us humans’ through their appreciation of special, unique, ‘social worlds’, in the ‘mesh’ we see ourselves in complex and deep sets of relations, in which these categories become difficult. Posthumanists have been driving this agenda for some years. The agenda of philosophical and general complexity theorizing for example has been precisely to recognize that ‘we exist in a totally . . . interconnected universe’ (Cudworth and Hobden, 2013b: 433). In this world, feedback loops are non-linear, and these loops cannot be explained ‘with reference to elements in the system’ as in a Newtonian system (Cudworth and Hobden, 2013b: 433). In the mesh we recognize that the ‘environment for any system is provided by all other systems’ (Cudworth and Hobden, 2013b: 437), including human systems on non-human ones. Thus there is no such thing as an ‘environment’ as a ‘background’, or an empty space, against which human ‘things’ move. In the relational universe humans and animals are not so much subdivided as co-live symbiotically. This is why Cudworth and Hobden argue that we need wider differentiated accounts of agency ‘which broaden and specify our conceptual repertoires’ beyond ‘human (dominated) accounts of agency’ (Cudworth and Hobden, 2013b: 438; see also chapters in Cudworth, Hobden, and Kavalski, 2018b in particular chapter 5). With such notions in hand, animals, plants, and other processing beings become worthy of our consideration and are considerations for us in all we do, even as we have forgotten their role as we have designated them to the ‘background’ to our wars, and struggles of emancipation. I argue then that relational cosmology ultimately helps us push beyond, far beyond, classical social science relationality, towards the critical/post- humanist vision in which we are ‘more than human’: we are interested in the human and
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how it is made and we are interested in how it traverses non-human worlds in so doing. Sciences, human or natural, travel across these worlds: together, linking relations to relations, not ‘lifting’ layers of relations. Indeed, Smolin’s intriguing notions about science being about relating to the cosmos as a community (1997: 370) are striking. He could be taken to suggest that the role of science is to make kin (in Haraway’s words) with cosmic collaborators. We will pick up this thematic again in chapter 7 as we develop democracy, science, and critical humanist relational thinking for politics and IR. Before we move to further explorations, let us make some important, if technical, comments on some key philosophical concerns implicated in the relational mesh proposed here.
Emergence One of the things this thoroughgoing relational framing speaks to in an intriguing way is the idea of ‘emergence’, a long-standing but much-contested philosophical notion developed in the nineteenth and elaborated in the twentieth century to address the issue of ‘reductionism’ or ‘physicalism’ in the sciences (for debates see e.g. Chalmers, 2006; Bedau and Humphries, 2007). Can we, and if so, to what extent can we reduce the explanation of chemical properties to physics or mental properties to neurology? Are the social sciences distinct from the natural sciences because the human and the social are emergent properties not to be understood through physics, chemistry or even neuroscience? How we relate to emergence from this relational cosmology viewpoint is worth further thought—even as I cannot here claim to ‘resolve’ an issue of such level of complexity—because seemingly there is a difficult relationship here with arguments on emergence. On the one hand, it must be recognized that emergence has been a key conceptual tool of relational cosmology as well as relational social theory explored here, as they have battled the forces of ‘reductionism’, the attempt to reduce all science to ‘physics’. To battle the tendencies to reduce ‘levels down’, it has been important to argue that complex systems display emergent properties; biological systems cannot be understood by atomic physics and social systems are emergent from biological ones. The very notion of novelty in a complex system implies a sense of emergence: the non-reducibility of the properties of the complex system to the ‘sum of the mechanical causes’. Novelty implies and requires the unpredictability, the unexpectedness of properties emergent from ‘lower level’ processes. It is no surprise then that emergence comes to have a ‘fundamental and irreducible meaning’ for relational cosmology (Smolin in Unger and Smolin, 2015: 425). Yet, on the other hand, there are varied notions of emergence and how we deploy emergence may also undermine our appreciation of the complex and
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multiple relationalities which give rise to complex systems. Certainly there would seem to be here an uncomfortable relationship with the kind of arguments for ‘strong emergence’ which seek to ‘separate’ scientific disciplines on account of their focus on strongly independent kinds of objects. In the mesh, instead, we should be interested across the sciences, as Smolin too emphasizes: not least because how a ‘science’ understands its ‘objects’ has an impact on how other sciences understand theirs. For example, as relational cosmologists have argued, our social and political notions are tied up with cosmological assumptions and vice versa. The clear-blue water between the sciences, and their subject matters, in a relational cosmos seems to be also denied by relational cosmology. In light of the discussion of the ‘mesh’ here, and its emphasis on ‘melting boxes into the air’ we may have some reason to be wary of some claims around emergence, if not all kinds of claims, those types of claims which would prevent us from seeing how relations ‘shoot through’ ‘levels’ or ‘sciences’. Indeed, treated as ‘perfected’ or absolute, as a way of lifting ‘realms’ of novelty from universe’s relations, emergence can also be quite a difficult notion for how we relate to the mesh. This is because, ultimately, biological and social sciences are tied up with cosmological questions and cosmology itself is tied up with physics, maths, philosophy, and politics. Nor is the ‘human’, say, an easy ‘sociological’, or ‘biological’, or ‘physical’ object of explanation. To grapple with ‘it’, multiple sciences need to undo and redo their conceptual premises. Ontological categories such as the human, or a quark, or a lifeform are not ‘simply’ emerged ‘from’ the world’s relationalities, nor are they fixed, clear in their borders, or ‘natural’ or ‘social’. In the mesh, most things are difficult to define, porous (Haraway, 2016), ‘social nature’ (Burke et al., 2016), ‘natureculture’ (Haraway, 1997), or ‘factish’ (Latour, 2010). We may indeed need words to describe the many forms of novelty in relations, but we must also remember the porosity and intra-connectedness of ‘entities’ and ‘levels’ and ‘relations’ of which they are made. Thus, for example, we must be careful of how we treat ‘humans’ and ‘social life’: they do not simply exist ‘emerged out’ of ‘material substrate’, in separation; they also emerged so historically, materially, in relations (including power relations) with human and non-human processes. As Latour puts it: ‘You cannot layer the physical part, and then add the economic layer and then the political—there is no layer . . . You cannot define a sort of a physical world, and then worlds on top of it’ (in Salter and Williams, 2016: 9). Surely our emergent qualities too are constantly constrained by the mesh, moulded by relations in it. They are also of the mesh. Like symbionts they remain bound to the mesh. And as such, the emergent properties too shift. As Cudworth and Hobden helpfully put it, emergence insofar as it is useful notion ‘is also a transformative process . . . everything which forms transforms’ (Cudworth and
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Hobden, 2013: 435). It is these transformations in relations we should pay heed to; rather than ‘resting’ on our ‘emerged’ laurels of ontological ‘layers’.
Reality, Realism This intervention, much like Smolin’s theorizing, starts from the acceptance of basic principles of philosophical realism. Specifically, here, this is taken to denote not just the existence of a reality independent of individual observers but rather, as I take Bhaskar’s philosophical realism to express it, as a kind of recalcitrance, a pushing at us, of reality. Reality is real not because it is mind-independent ‘out there’ doing something, but because ‘it’ is, as we are ‘in it’ making it, also recalcitrant to our, and other species’ attempts to know it. Relational totality does not mean unfettered ‘access’, it also means situated knowing, limits, recognition of the recalcitrance of relations to our ways of thinking of how we relate. Relations exceed us and our knowledge even as they make us and the world. On this view, crucially, we have then no direct access to reality, which is why abstraction and conceptualization are still important for how we come to know it. They are ways of pushing ‘beyond’ and as such also always incomplete. They keep us on our toes. Against Latour and others we should be sceptical also of access through direct experience of relations. As limited knowers, situated in a complex world of relations, we can (and do) hold on to abstraction exactly because it can help us stretch our situated knowledge, and thus also how we relate to the world.
Relational Cosmology and the Pluriverse This account is not developed from postcolonial or decolonial thought or from the current calls for a more global IR (Acharya, 2016). Yet, an important and interesting line of analysis that has emerged from exploring this perspective is the conversation with these strands of thought. For some time non-Western and decolonial thought have challenged Western thinking for its focus on atomism and substantialism (Qin, 2016; Kavalski, 2018), its lack of interest in relations (Qin, 2016 ; Shilliam, 2015), and also its ignorance of and inclination to erase ‘other’ ways of being and relating in the world (Agathangelou and Ling, 2009; Blaney and Tickner, 2017). IR as a Eurocentric field is seen as deeply embedded and implicated in these processes (for analysis of varieties of Eurocentrism see Hobson, 2012). As Aganthangelou and Ling put it (2009: 2) there is in neoliberal world politics, and IR as a partial reflection of it, ‘a systematic effort to wipe out all other ways of seeing, doing, being, and relating in the world’.
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These notions have been developed recently in particular by pluriverse theorists who have argued that embedded in much of modern science, social science, and IR is a tendency to ‘erase’ worlds, by the conceptual fiat of assuming that we live in ‘one world’, a monoverse that often goes by the name ‘universe’ (see Mignolo, 2018; in IR Querejazu, 2016 and Blaney and Tickner, 2017). In such a monoversal universe, or as Law (2011: 2) calls it, ‘Northern container world’ (in which we, other people and our beliefs about ‘the world’ are ‘contained’) we are expected to habit a single globe, a single world; but in so doing are discouraged from seeing the different worlds—ontological worlds of experience, of lifeways—of others, leading often to erasure of lifeways not recognizable to our world of relations. There is no ‘overarching’ world with overarching logics (of governance); but rather ‘contingent, local and practical engagements’ (Law, 2011: 2). Non-Western, postcolonial, decolonial and pluriversal thought present an important challenge for IR, for social theory, and indeed for relational cosmology. Indeed, one could see this relational perspective, explicitly derived from a text called ‘singular universe’, as very clearly a statement of the monoverse: that is, a theory which seeks to read the world ‘as one, real object’, seeking to reduce alternative cosmologies to a singular fold, thus ‘effac[ing] alternative worlds’ (Blaney and Tickner, 2017: 293). Is this view reducing the views of alternative cosmologies—say Andean, Confucian, or Karelian—to just ‘other perspectives’ on a ‘singular universe’? While one could read this relational perspective so; we must remember that it also arguably speaks to the pluriverse theorists and decolonial thinkers in some interesting ways which facilitate conversation rather than trying to shut it down. First, relational cosmology too denies the possibility of objective knowledge: contra positivists in a relational universe there are no views from nowhere. It challenges classical conceptions of a unified, totalized reality within our grasp, and depoliticized conceptions of science or the cosmos. Second, relational cosmology also helps us recognize that there are multiple ‘lifeways’ in a relational universe; that is, nothing in the mesh is ‘the same’ but always constituted by difference, plural relational worlds. The relational universe, in other words, is less like a monoverse, a ‘thing’ or a ‘unified totality’ (Mignolo, 2018: x). It is rather also by necessity ‘pluriversal’. Paraphrasing Mignolo’s words, the relational universal ‘can only be pluriversal’ (Mignolo, 2018: x). This also allows us to recognize that, third, even in the pluriverse, lifeways or worlds, while different, are also related, they do not stand in isolation, but are in a relational dance with each other. Indeed, it is ‘cultivation of attentiveness’ (Kavalski, 2018: 100) to this dance of different positionalities, that concerns both pluriverse theorists and relational cosmologists. Fourth, relational perspective is in tune with the kind of social-natural breaching philosophies and cosmologies some pluriverse theorists wish to point to (e.g. Querejazu, 2016). This perspective directly challenges the humanist, ‘separated’
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ways of theorizing the world and knowing the world seeking to connect ‘us’ with ontologies more than human. Arguably this perspective then could be seen to show that ‘Western’ science so criticized in pluriverse theories also undermines the very ‘Western’ science. Western science has in a sense been called to ‘loosen’ its own ontological and epistemological commitments and in so doing also can enter into a much more open and interesting conversation with alternative cosmologies. Indeed, there are striking similarities between Andean cosmovision and the critical humanist relational thinking explored here, not only in terms of how worlds are wrapped up together but in terms of how people are positioned in relation to non-human worlds. There are also striking convergences with relationalism developed by Ling (2013; 2017), Qin (2016), and Kavalski (2018) even as the similarities are perhaps more ‘family resemblances’ (Fierke, 2019: 159). Relational worldviews or cosmologies too are not ‘the same’, nor need be ‘totalizing’; they can be perceived as being in a relational dialogue, or intra-action, with each other. Even as there are a number of interesting convergences and possibilities for conversation between relational cosmology and pluriverse theories, this perspective also remains sceptical of the undercurrents of pluriverse in that it is adverse to: First, the separation of worlds (as literally separate worlds): such separationist tendencies, relational cosmology argues, can be evocative of the drive to ‘escape the world’ to invent different worlds rather than dealing with their co-constitution. I can understand the political need to defend different (autonomous) worlds (encroachment on worlds is precisely the experience of colonialism), but as an ontological pre-given it is not an unproblematic assumption, for in so doing we also loose the mesh, the relations, the collaborations across difference, in Tsing’s words. Second, readings of science as Science: I am sympathetic to the critical reading of Western science, for it has been, fundamentally, involved in the colonial processes. As Allan’s (2018) account shows, colonial thought and practice was foundationally embedded in specific cosmological patterns of thought, with their origins in Newton. Yet, challenging these cosmologies also requires engagement with science and this engagement can show that even by sciences’ account of science, the sciences are no longer the (Western, modern) Sciences. To then reproduce this narrative, without reflection on how ‘Western’ science itself points towards ways of thinking within its own parameters, is not productive. Instead I would like to call on a more detailed conversation between relational theorist from various parts of the world, the pluriverse theorists and relational cosmologists. Despite the seeming divergences, there are potentially more alliances here than divergences—and this is said not with the aim of forcing the pluriverse or other forms of relational thought into this singular relational universe! Much more remains to be said about how this conversation might unfold and what colonial dynamics may play out in relational cosmology (for such
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may very well be present: Is this still a ‘totalistic’ narrative? How well can it accommodate other thinking? What practices of relating worlds or cosmologies without erasure does it come with?), but certainly the starting point here in discussions with relational thinking and alternative cosmologies will be rather different, ontologically, epistemologically, and also politically and ideologically.
Coming Back to IR Theory: Some Reorientations The discussion above has not directly addressed International Relations. How does this relate to IR? How do we think IR in a relational universe? We will investigate this in more detail in the chapters to come, particularly in chapter 7, but some important openings towards this discussion should be made here. The first thing we might note is that if a relational revolution is what we are looking for, it surely is a good thing that International Relations is, many would argue, a fundamentally relational subject: it is, after all, all about the study of relations, international relations. Or is it? As we have seen, it matters how we think relations, not merely that we use the concept of relations. Relational thinking comes in different hues. It is of significance for us to note then that at the heart of classical IR theory lies a rather different set of assumptions about relations than those developed here. At the heart of IR lie substantialist assumptions which has come to mean, as Qin (2016: 37) powerfully puts it from his relational perspective, that IR ‘has little welldeveloped theory of relations and has not seriously theorized on relations’. * * * The classical image of the ontology of IR arises from realist and liberal visions. Here the state is accorded a special agency in the sphere of the international. Even if challenged by other agencies, multinational corporations, or NGOs, the state stands as the ultimate decider and authority. It is autonomous in international relations. It is where the ‘buck stops’ for the realists and where, even for the liberals, other kinds of agency and interest come to ‘aggregate’. International relations here then is imagined as the relations of ‘thing-like’ objects. In realism, these objects move against the ‘background’ of ‘material world of resources’ and the ‘social vacuum’ of anarchy. If you prefer the liberal view, here the international is made of a much busier ‘particle zoo’ of states, NGOs, MNCs, and other actors interacting, on occasion in complex networks. In either case things—states or other actors—inhabit the world of IR. In both cases, intriguingly, we have an image of international relations with relations conceived of in a Newtonian manner as ‘things’ interacting: either in cycles of repetition (realism), or in more linear, progressive regular patterns (liberals). We have a ‘modernist ontology, which reduce[s] flux to fixed laws
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and entities, both knowable and governable by a construction of a human subject separated from nature by the powers of reason’ (Grove and Chandler, 2017: 79). We have a discipline built on ‘universe composed of discrete and self-subsistent actors’ (Qin, 2016: 36). The IR vision of relationality is not, then, in line with how we wish to think on relations through relational cosmology. But is this a hasty judgement? Have the post-positivists in IR not already taken us to a more relational cosmos? A more relationally rich imagery is, indeed, what many theoretical approaches critical of realism and liberalism try and accomplish. Postpositivists have tried to build a more full, more socially complex understanding of various international and global relationalites. Constructivists, Marxists, feminists, poststructuralists, and many others challenge the classical image of IR as relations of states or other seemingly autonomous rational actors, as misleading: it is reflective, they argue, of the situated knowledge of certain (state and business) actors making the world in the image of the conceptions of the world that benefit them. Constructivists, for example, have argued that IR has less to do with interaction of thing-like objects against backgrounds as it has with intersubjective construction of relational processes between individuals and states. Underlying ‘anarchy’ are cultures of relating; underlying ‘actors’ are cultural relations in the process of transmission (for classic statements of constructivism see e.g. Wendt, 1999; Finnemore and Sikkink, 1998). Feminists argue that various global social relations of gendered kind are also implicated in construction of the thing-like veneer of states: states are gendered structures and international relations themselves ways of working out global power relations between genders (Enloe, 1990; Weber, 2001). Poststructuralists concur: it is the discourses through which we break down the nature of the subject that we create the subject (Ashley, 1988; Edkins, 1999). And for Marxists, too, relations are foundational, but class relations and relations of production (Rupert, 2016). All these approaches helpfully point to various re-thinkings of relations. They in essence point to an analysis of a variety of ‘global social relations’, which are seen to criss-cross the seemingly thing-like relations of states: economic relations, cultural relations, gender relations, relations between colonized populations. A much more complex view of the ‘texture’ of international relations emerges from these perspectives. And postpositivism has in recent years been developed in even more explicit relational directions by practice theorists (Adler and Pouliot, 2011), developers of relational social theory such as Daniel Nexon and Patrick Jackson (1999) and the relational theories of world politics (Qin, 2016; Kavalski, 2018). These critiques of substantialism and of God’s eye theories of IR have pushed towards a more processual, grounded, and also global IR. Here international society and global governance are seen as a processes (Qin, 2016) and the international and world politics a dance of relational flows (Kavalski, 2018). These sets of
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relational perspectives demand new, less ‘thing-like’, law-bound, thinking. From the perspective of relational cosmology they are then very welcome indeed in the field. They call out ‘IR’s poignant ontological and epistemic lack of relationality’ (Kavalski, 2018: 96, italics in original) and in so doing, also, its related ‘imperial, patriarchal and racist attitudes’ (Kavalski, 2018: 96). Yet arguably, even in postpositivist IR and even within the relational theories, certain questions remain. For example, we must note that in constructivist, Marxist, and many feminist perspectives some humanist and also Newtonian assumptions can still live on (Cudworth, Hobden, and Kavalski, 2018a: 4). Not all perspectives challenge thing-language consistently and others commit themselves to the human sphere of relations alone. Further, the dream of a ‘single humanity’ lives on in many (post-)Marxist relationalisms as do the cosmotropes arising from the background belief in special human responsibilities (to save, to guard, to protect). As such, postpositivist scholarship can also fall prey to less than straightforward ‘unifications’, ‘glorifications’, and ‘reproductions’ of (uncritically universal) humanity. As we discuss in more detail in chapters that follow, from a relational cosmology perspective the tracking of complex ‘global social relations’ of the postpositivists and relational IR scholars is welcome but it still subject to important questions. Even the explicitly more relational perspectives can benefit from asking: Do they still imagine relations as dependent on actors in networks? Do they claim to know relations that matter, and if so, on what basis? And what kind of images of the international and the global have they in mind in relational relating? Whose relations count and why? On the relational view we have expounded here, we have seen that various extensions of relational thinking can (always) take place. Re-relating to relations in the mesh involves opening our eyes to entities as processes—international society and global governance for example are, indeed, processes, ‘a becoming rather than a being’ (Qin, 2016: 37). Yet, it also goes further in that we are asked not to pin down relationality, how to theorize relationally, as much as we are asked to re-imagine relations in the difficult, strange, always-less-than-fullyknowable mesh. We are asked to stretch, not fix. Further, within the relational cosmology perspective developed here we are asked to question ‘human relationalities’ and in particular their ‘lifting’. In the mesh ‘we’ are made human in particular ways through the international and the global (discussed more in the following chapter); yet we are also necessarily ‘more than human’. Or as Fishel (2017: 101) nicely puts it: ‘we have never been wholly human’ despite the fantastic stories we tell about ourselves and our special abilities. In relational mesh we unfold symbiotically, or parasitically,⁴ in relations ⁴ Serres’ analogy of the human as a parasite then is appropriate: human relations are ‘a parasitic chain which interrupts or parasitizes other kinds of relations’ (Serres, quoted by Wolfe in Serres, 2007 [1980]: xv)
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of biological, chemical, geophysical, and astrophysical kinds, and it is these relations too that we have to negotiate to survive.⁵ Indeed, ‘socially’ we are already in ecological relations for societies ‘are both partial types of ecologies and . . . are always open onto broader ecological relations with the natural world in which they are embedded’ (Bryant, 2014: 7). What relational cosmology and the translation of it to relational thinking means, then, is that International Relations is also about negotiation of messy human and non-human medleys. For some centuries, IR has lived conceptually in a rather delimited conceptual— and cosmic—universe, with its states and its global networks, its human coordination problems. But we should have much more in the mesh: we should see, feel, relate to more in the mesh that matters for IR. As Jairus Grove (2019) calls on us: we should ‘relax’ our commitment to the human in IR a little so as to be able to think on the relations of human and non-human more. It is argued in the rest of this book that IR needs to ‘get with’ the programme of seeing these wider types of relations and seeing their significance for how we think IR and political possibilities into the future. In the mesh, wars, markets, and global epidemics all involve mediations and negotiations of multiple sets of relations, human and non-human. In fact, we come to see that most of the biggest IR questions today relate to how we negotiate relations between humans in the context of relations with animals, plants, ecosystems, climate, fish, bacteria, and microbes. Think of flu viruses, think of food production systems, think even of the migrant crisis. These issues are not about human interaction problems; they are at a fundamental level about how humans negotiate and structure human and non-human relations. What relational cosmology challenges, much like complexity theory, ecologism, new materialism, and pluriverse theorists, then, is the habitual tendency of the study and practice of IR to focus on human interactions. It suggests we should perhaps focus on understanding our various relations and systemic structural entanglements and negotiations with various relations we are of as well as in. What this means for IR, for ethics, for politics in the twenty-first century will be explored in the chapters that follow.
Conclusion The vision of sterile engineering emancipating us from our planetmates is not only tasteless and boring, it borders on the hideous. No matter how much our own species preoccupies us, life is a far wider system . . . an incredibly complex interdependence of matter and energy among millions of species beyond (and within) our skin. ⁵ Wilkinson (2003) suggests that it is perhaps geophysical processes such as water cycles and carbon cycles which should be the ‘objects’ of conservation, not ‘entities’ such as ‘humans’ or ‘animals’.
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These Earth aliens are our relatives, our ancestors, a part of us. Without ‘the other’ we do not survive. Our symbiotic, interactive, interdependent past is connected through animated waters. (Margulis, 1998: 140) This chapter has sought to expound but also take to task some of the assumptions that appear in pop cosmology and IR discussions, most notably the tendency to ‘lift’ our view of humans on the planet and the resultant lapse (from a relational sentiment) into a view where we are special humans, in control not only of human fates but of the planet. Emphasis on situating, grounding, and relating ‘humans’ to their wider totality of relations should emerge more forcefully in the social sciences and IR as a result of engagement with relational cosmology. This process will also allow us to treat with more care the complex politics of the human on the planet in relations. The singular humanity trope emerges rather too easily from (some of our) background cosmologies. But humanity is also a complex medley, made of entanglements with colonialism, gendered exclusions, human, animal, and plant maltreatment. Relational cosmology can help us in charting the course from a Newtonian cosmology of things in backgrounds, and a related theological legacy of ‘lifting’ special humans above all other relations, towards a more fully relational and critically humanist reengagement in the world. From this perspective we see a complex dynamic co-existence in relations, our constant collaboration (Tsing, 2015) in the ‘wider’ world of relations, which our rather narrow IR ontologies had ‘forgotten’ to include in our field of vision. Seeing these relations matters and not only because they give us a new sense of the human (as a messy medley) and of non-human (as more than a background), but also because they expose to us the intense negotiations involved in conducting wars, climate negotiations, global health policies. Negotiations in relations human and non-human are involved in such politics; much to the surprise of our previous, rather naïve, humanist dreams in IR. We need to know and care about our wider relations—between impure humans and between impure humans and other ‘strange strangers’—and this may help us yet to address some of the key political negotiations required on this troubled planet (as discussed in ch. 7). Relational cosmology then ‘does’ something to our mindsets, our vocabularies, our interests. And, no, it doesn’t simply ‘lift’ us off the planet and cause us to critique our petty human in-fighting. More than that, and more challengingly than that, it relates us to our relations in a thoroughgoing and rather uncomfortable way. Being, or becoming, situated in relations is difficult, as we do not quite know where we are, how we are made, and how to ‘relate to relations’; and yet in these relations it becomes difficult to ‘ignore’ the many relations ‘we’ rely on to process in the world. And, as we will see in the next chapter, it may also become difficult not to ‘commit’ to the world anew: we become also responsive and response-able to relationalities as we re-relate to them.
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6 Ethics, in Relations? There never was a God . . . And Nietszche is also now dead. All there is of Nature is what is around us. All there is of Being is relations among real, sensible things. All we have of natural law is a world that has made itself. All we may expect of human law is what we can negotiate among ourselves, and what we take as our responsibility . . . . All we may look up to as judges are each other. All that is possible of utopia is what we make with our own hands. (Smolin, 1997: 373) [Protect the human (Amnesty International UK) slogan] succinctly captures one of the most powerful beliefs in contemporary international relations: that ‘the human’ is the ultimately subject of security, and that its protection should trump all other concerns. But security threats do not affect humans in isolation. Rather they irrupt within the heterogeneous collectives that humans co-constitute with diverse non-human beings. (Mitchell, 2014a: 5) It is traditional for texts in IR and social science to ask: what are the ethicopolitical consequences of specific ontological or epistemological resolutions we put forward? If indeed ontology is politics (Wight 2006), and if normative or ethical commitments concerning right or wrong are inevitably built into our theories (see e.g. Erskine, 2016), then the relational reorientations we have discussed in the previous chapters should matter for our ethical and political commitments. We will discuss more explicitly ‘political’ reorientations in chapter 7, but before we do so this chapter attempts to think through the question of ‘ethical’¹ commitments as they pertain to the relational world we have dived into.
¹ I focus on the concept of ethics rather than the alternative notions morals/morality or normativity, for reasons I hope will become clear. Although moral, ethical, and normative are terms interchangeable for some, others perceive distinctions between them. As Brown and Eckersley (2018: 6) argue, morality implies ‘duties of proper conduct’ whereas ‘ethical decisions are situated, practical judgement’. The meaning of normative varies, but is taken often to imply social or political reference points (norms) arising from ethical frameworks or moral principles. I do not wish to enter into the debate on these terms but focus here on the term ethics. Indeed, the account developed here could be seen as ‘ethical’ (implying situated judgement) and yet not normative or moral (lacking general moral
International Relations in a Relational Universe. Milja Kurki, Oxford University Press (2020). © Milja Kurki. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198850885.001.0001
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, ? 137 How should we relate to ‘others’ from a relational perspective and does some sort of new ethical orientation or criteria emerge from here? It turns out that answering this question is not easy, for concerns of ethics ‘clash’ with our relational reorientation in rather challenging ways. Indeed, classical ethical debates, with their roots deep in theological debates, humanist commitments, and generalization of moral codes, have a difficult relationship with the kind of processual, contingent, critical humanist relationality developed here. Even Smolin’s placing of our morality ‘between us’, it is seen, has to be extended, for reasons Mitchell articulates: the human, as we have seen, is not a self-evident endpoint of ethical discussion. Helpfully, some of the more relational traditions of ethics can help us take some initial steps towards more relational ethics. To get a better grasp of what an ethics in relations beyond humans might mean I turn to critical humanist thinkers on ethics—Karen Barad and Florence Chiew—for assistance. We will see that quite a challenging rethinking of not just ethics—as responseability in how we matter relations and relate to relations—is required from this perspective. This is challenging not only because it seems to eschew general rules and criteria for good or bad human action but also because it is concerned with exploring the possibility of ethics beyond the human (not just of human ethics visà-vis non-humans). Much less than a fully blown ‘ethical’ or normative framework emerges here by the standards of classical ethical or normative theory expectations. Yet, perhaps the reflections are not irrelevant, for despite not giving us clear criteria for action or behaviour, relational cosmology is still fully interested in our intense concerns, feelings, response-abilities to our manifold relations. ‘Oughts’ are created in how we see, know, think, act, commit, and these oughts are real and intense, and they may be useful to reflect on in the context of ethical debates even as they do not directly address or seek to develop general moral or ethical judgements in the usual sense. As Zanotti’s (2018) important recent work shows, it is precisely through redirecting ethics from general judgements to more contextual, entangled ones that important advances can be made in thinking international ethics. And yet relational cosmology may at the same time be useful in reminding us of the limits of ethics too as a way of relating to relations. In IR, and in many human societies, to think ethically is the measure of being a human: we explore both ethics that are ‘more than human’ and are also reminded to be cautious of the foregrounding of ethics that might cause us to lose sight of relations and the possibility of ‘re-relating to relations’. Indeed, my suspicion is that even the more ‘relational ethics’ may delimit us, which leads me to somewhat uncomfortable
rules or norms). The anthropocentrism of ethics (and morality/normativity) is an issue which troubles this chapter. While this troubles ethics, it troubles morality/normativity even more. This provides us another reason to focus on ethics.
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but perhaps also important-to-consider conclusions with regard to ethics and normative thought in IR. The structure of the chapter is as follows. First, I will discuss the ‘problems with ethics’ as we observe them from our perspective. Second, I discuss how relational orientations to ethics have already helped us address some of these issues with ethics. Third, with the help of Barad and Chiew, I discuss what a relational relating to ethics might look like from our perspective. I then discuss the limits of ethics as well as revisiting, briefly, what this might mean for how we converse in IR vis-à-vis ethics.
The Trouble with Ethics As Hutchings argues, in common discourse the notion of ethics is associated with the idea that there are ‘codes of behavior or sets of values that set out what is right and wrong to do within particular contexts’ (Hutchings, 2010: 5). This is why we tend to think that an ethical person is one who acts in accordance with accepted ethical rules—thou shalt not kill, for example. Ethics has been tied up with the idea that there may be principles (variously derived) that prescribe, or help us judge, what is good or bad, moral or immoral, in conduct by ourselves or others. Ethical horizons and frameworks help us decipher how we ‘should’ act. Ethical (and normative and/or moral [I bracket the discussion of these as indicated above]) questions are fundamental to international relations and International Relations (see e.g. Brown, 1992; Hoover, 2018; Reus-Smit and Snidal, 2008; Erskine, 2016; Burke, Lee-Koo, and McDonald, 2014). Not only do politicians and policymakers make many life and death decisions based on valuejudgements regarding right and wrong, but also in the study of IR how we conceptualize the world, critique, evaluate, and prescribe actions involves fundamentally and inevitably ethical commitments. This is why all IR theories have an ethics, traced powerfully in Reus-Smit and Snidal’s 2008 volume, and why escaping ethical reflection is difficult, even as the field has historically been dominated by (seemingly, but not really) anti-ethical realist and positivist currents of thought (Hoover, 2018). In the last few decades the field of IR has finally embraced its ethical underpinnings: the state of normative theory, International Political Theory, and thus ethical reflection is ‘healthy’ in IR today (Brown and Erskine, 2018: 4). Students are taught to think of their ethical commitments and how they derive them. There has been an effort not only to develop international ethics with regard to war and intervention but also to develop a ‘global ethics’, ‘inquiry that addresses ethical questions and problems arising out of the global interconnection and interdependence of world’s population’ (Hutchings, 2010: 1; see also Burke, Lee-Koo, and McDonald, 2014).
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, ? 139 Ethical inquiry is more than ‘reading texts’, prescribing norms or critique; it also involves an effort to inquire into, derive, justify, or ground our ethical values, practices, and norms, which in turn involves careful study of different modalities of ethical argumentation—deontological and consequentialist, communitarian and cosmopolitan, substantialist, and procedural. What should be the basis of us respecting a moral rule or holding a moral commitment? And where do these commitments arise from? Asking such questions are important, not least because our commitments to each other are often grounded in varied and often inconsistent justifications. Yet, here my concerns are not directed by an impulse to justify ethical commitments. Here my interest is distinct: I do not come to ethics to ground relational commitments, I come to ethics to ask, given the practise we have given to relational thinking so far, how should we think ethically from here (if indeed we can)? In putting relational cosmology into conversation with ethics, things quickly become difficult: thinking on ethics and ethical commitments seems to involve some curious habits of thought which do not sit easily with the relational orientation we have been trying to outline. The origins of ethics in religious traditions of thought is not irrelevant to our concerns. Relational cosmology has been concerned to demonstrate, and critique, the continuous and often hidden role of ‘theological’ legacies on even ‘secular’ science and conceptual frameworks. This concern is arguably poignant with regard to ethics. Many of the concerns, key concepts, and commitments of seemingly secular ethics derive from theological concerns. In Bain’s (forthcoming) words, they can be seen as ‘worldly applications of a theological pattern’. From just war to discourses on human rights, Christian theology provides the key reference points for how secular Western morality is structured, even when we do not follow explicitly religious practices. The universalist, ‘impartialist’ (Erskine 2008), cosmopolitan thinkers provide perhaps the clearest links to theological structures of thought. Here we can observe that universal deontological principles which stand aside from ‘us’, which transcend us, are the cause of moral commitments. As Brown (1992: 52) puts it, the driving force of our morality is ‘elsewhere’ in principles of reason, not our own social or political being. Even as Reason has overtaken God, within such frameworks our moral principles are equally transcendentally given. If we accept that there is not a very clear line to be drawn between theological and secular thought (see for discussion Taylor, 2007; Eagleton, 2014; Bain, 2017), we can see that despite the fact that secular ethicists drop God from the picture, much of deontological ethics owes its legacy to Christian theological thought. The legacy of theology also seems to imply in such frameworks that humans, as God’s secular children, are the special species that can live by ‘moral codes’ and ‘value systems’ and thus ones capable of and enticed to ‘reflect’ on moral dilemmas and problems. This is ultimately why we have ethics and ethical dilemmas that so
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trouble humans, the special appreciators of the difficulties of moral judgement. Is a cat moral? Algae? A house plant? Surely not! Moral capacity is of rational conscious beings capable of understanding codes and value systems, reflecting on them, and intentionally acting on such reflection. As is becoming fast apparent, there are some important assumptions being made in such ethical thinking. And these assumptions have a difficult relationship with the orientation we have been developing via relational cosmology. Three problems in particular can be delineated. First, many (although not all, as we will see) of those interested in universal or cosmopolitan ethics have been attracted to arguments which appeal to nonrelational ‘grounds’ for ethical commitments; ‘transcendental’ grounds or ‘general principles’ for moral and ethical rules, whether derived from God, reason, rights, or duties to others. Once, moral codes were derived from God’s will or the commandments of the Bible, but even much of ‘secular’ ethics harks back to argumentative structures which derive moral codes from abstract moral laws or reasoning even if the reference point has become secularized (as reason, right, or duty). Second, closely attached to transcendental groundings of ethics are evocations of the unique qualities of ‘humans’. If humans were special in God’s eyes, they are also special as agents and subjects of ethics. Indeed, almost by definition, ethics and morality is tied to discussions of humans’ moral and ethical duties towards other humans and, on occasion, towards non-humans.² Third, ethics is drawn to generalize. Many cosmopolitan ethicists for example wish to transcend particularities—our cultures, religion, family ties—that is, the specific relations we are in, in search for general principles that give moral guidance, such as rights. It is the search for this type of ethics that the search for a ‘global ethics’, for example, can be seen to be tied up with: given humans’ interconnectedness on this planet, what kind of a global ethic, minimal or maximal, can we have and on what can it be grounded (see e.g. Hutchings, 2010: 1)? The assumption here is that general rules, which escape the bounds of individual cases or people, can be deciphered from a ‘global condition’. This is even if the rules themselves are considered ‘fictions’ we socially construct. If ethics derives much of its power from universal moral laws or our special rationality, and if it needs to generalize moral codes, is this way of relating to the universe anti-thetical to us relating to the world via relational cosmology where we
² Indeed, the anthropocentrism of ethics does not just concern focus on the human but focus on humans as the sources, referent points, and agents of ethics. To justify the focus on humans some evoke special qualities of humans as justification of their superior ethicality (such as rationality, compassion, and so on) although some ethicists have sought to ‘expand’ ethics to non-humans via opening up of notions of agency or sentience (see e.g. Mitchell, 2014a: 9–10). Even so, at the heart of ethics stands an anthropocentrism which derives ethics from human experience, human commitments, human care, or the consequences (of treatment of non-humans, say) for humans.
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, ? 141 are of relations, processing, beyond the human as well as as humans? Or should we bypass ethics altogether as a humanist, theological structure of thought which will not help us relate to the ‘mesh’? Can ethics think through relations and can relationality be thought through in terms of ethics? As we ask these questions, the good news is that some scholars of ethics come to us with reassuring answers: we can, they argue, think ethics through relations, we can also consider our ethics as arising from our relations. Let us examine how they can help us.
Towards More Relational Ethics Some help is available closer to (the classical ethics) ‘home’ than we think. An important and probably the most generally recognized form of relational thinking on ethics is captured by the well respected and long-running tradition of ‘communitarian’ ethics, the sparring partner of cosmopolitan ethics. If cosmopolitan ethical theories have had a tendency to revert to universalist notions surrounding the rights of individual humans, communitarianism has opposed the universalist aspirations of the cosmopolitans (Brown, 1992; Erskine, 2008; McIntyre, 1981). Communitarians instead have argued that we derive our ethical commitment to each other from each other: whether our nations, our families, or our communities more widely perceived. Our boundness, vulnerability, and relatedness is what gives us our ethical commitments, our ethical feelings for others, our drive to go and fight, to save, to distribute. A community of related beings, bound in not only political relations within a state but also in cultural relations with each other, generates in people the feeling of duty and ethical commitment towards fellow humans and indeed non-humans. Communitarians point to the weaknesses of cosmopolitan arguments precisely on account of their inability to think through particular relations humans exist in: we must derive ethics from where they actually arise, not from abstract universal statements, grounds, qualities, or notions. Universalist ethics ‘do not work’ because they are not adequately grounded in the actual relations we are in. The communitarian logic is one step towards an appreciation of relations between people as the ground for ethical commitments. And the logics of communitarian relating are these days increasingly even built into cosmopolitan attempts to transcend moral boundaries (for alternative, more communitarian ways of deriving cosmopolitan commitments see e.g. Erskine, 2008; Beardsworth, 2011). Similar but different arguments arise from advocates of the so-called ‘ethics of care’ approach. Here ethical commitments derive from our relations too: it is our interpersonal relations and capacities of benevolence and care, which give rise to our ethical commitments to others. Here the lapse to ‘generality’ so attractive to
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deontological (and arguably also generalist consequentialist) ethics is challenged by focus on the individual connections agents share. As Gilligan (2008) argues: any moral code of a generalized nature is ‘morally problematic, since it breeds moral blindness or indifference’. Abstract notions of duty and justice, she argued, were not ‘neutral’ but were founded on masculine privilege and positionality in specific (gendered) social relations. Given this, Gilligan sought to build an ethics which recognized the differential positionalities and also as such differential capacities and qualities of women and men in society. Men and women, she argued (Gilligan, 1982), relate differently to morality given their differential relational positioning in society. Ethics of care literature develops notions of attentiveness to the needs and wants of others and a sense of responsibility to vulnerability (Tronto, 2005). This has also been developed in relation to nonhuman or more than human worlds (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). Another set of more relational orientations to ethics arise from the poststructuralist critique of ethics and the work of Levinas, widely used in poststructuralist orientations to ethics. Levinas (1969; 1974) developed a theory of how we respond to others as we face them. His first philosophy develops, rather than an ‘ethics’, the thematics of how others impact on us with force. For Levinas, the notion of ‘ethical’ concern for others emerges from the affective encounters between us. These explorations have been used to develop phenomenological accounts of ‘ethical commitments’ from our encounters as we ‘respond’ to others (mostly human others) (Bergo, 2019). All these relational orientations to ethics offer us a hope of a different, less universalistic, more relational ethics. And they have as such been of interest to relational theorists in IR and beyond (see e.g. Cudworth and Hobden, 2017 on developments of ethics of care; and Dauphinee in Edkins and Vaughan Williams, 2009). Yet, arguably they do not develop in detail the orientations of the kind of relationality we have been exploring here. The limit of ethics is in all, or most, of these perspectives ‘the human’. In the same sense that social theories like to concern themselves with the study of the ‘social’—the ‘human world’—in the same sense ethics seems to concern those beings considered ‘ethical’, humans. Can we then, given our critical humanist extensions of relational cosmology in the previous chapter, develop an ‘ethics’ that emerges from relational orientation of such kind, and if so how? And do we do so by ‘expanding ethics’ as we know it or by developing new ontologies (Mitchell, 2014a)? In developing a position, I do not start from duty to others (Erskine, 2008), from our caring nature (e.g. Cudworth and Hobden, 2017), or indeed from ethics at all. In what follows, I develop one orientation to ethics compatible with relational cosmology (there may be others) with the help of two interesting relational thinkers with an interest in ethics: Karen Barad and Florence Chiew. Their reflections on ethics provide us, or have provided me, some useful ways of orienting both to the potential and the problems of ethics as revisited from the
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, ? 143 relational cosmos. The ethics derived from here does not look like deontological ethics of universal human rights, nor does it look like communitarian defence of national security; yet this could also be called an ethics, committed and responsible, in relations.
Conversation with Karen Barad: Meeting the Universe Halfway Karen Barad’s work Meeting the Universe Halfway is an important contribution to and extension of relational thinking in the social and natural sciences. It builds a bridge between social and natural science and also between debates in physics and debates in ethics. It is a unique contribution and in many respects in tune with the kind of intervention I have sought to open up in this book. My interest here is, however, not in developing Barad vis-à-vis relational cosmology in broader terms; rather, it is, more specifically, to develop ‘out’ towards relational cosmology, the reflections on ethics she develops. In this section, I will first begin with a brief summary of the arguments of her book Meeting the Universe Halfway. I will then move to a more specific discussion of her ethics. I will then specify the contributions she can make on important questions around ethics, focusing on the thematics of agency/intentionality, humanity, and re-relating to relations.
Barad’s Philosophy-Physics Karen Barad’s cross-disciplinary intervention seeks to bring home to social sciences the implications of quantum theory. Barad’s book comes with an important challenge, for us to take on the implications of science, specifically quantum physics for thought in ‘social science’ (specifically feminism). Crucially, Barad is not arguing that quantum physics provides us with useful ‘analogies’ to work with. Rather she seeks to build a new type of ‘foundation’ for social science through extension of ontological, epistemological and ethical implications of Bohr’s interpretation of quantum mechanics. We are not looking for a physical reductionism that explains social life, rather we need a ‘reassessment of physical and metaphysical notions that explicitly or implicitly rely on old ideas about the physical world’ (Barad, 2007: 24). Akin to our interest in relational cosmology, ‘[w]hat is needed’, Barad argues, ‘is an analysis that enables us to theorize the social and the natural together, to read our best understandings of social and natural phenomena through one another in a way that clarifies the relationship between them’ (Barad, 2007: 25). Significantly, it is also a relational picture that Barad is building on the basis of quantum science, although she develops her relationalism via a different vocabulary. Her starting point is to emphasize that quantum mechanics places us firmly
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as part of the world, ‘intra-acting’ not just ‘in’ but ‘of’ the world. Akin to relational cosmologists (but in a different way), she argues that ‘humans (like other parts of nature) are of the world, not just in the world, and surely not outside of it looking in’ (Barad, 2007: 206). Images of science or social science seeking to understand ‘from the outside’ the world we are in are deluded. Instead, just like Rovelli, she emphasizes ‘we are part of that nature that we seek to understand’ (Barad, 2007: 26). The implication of this starting point is captured in Barad’s concept of ‘intraaction’ examined in the previous chapter. For Barad, akin to our extension of relational cosmology, we process ourselves in the intra-actions we are of. We act with relations that cut across, shoot through; we do not ‘inter’-act between discrete things. And it is not just us, but (in an echo of Smolin’s relationality) also space and time that arise from those intra-actions. This is what she calls phenomena, the ‘differential patterns of mattering’, ‘diffraction patterns’ (Barad, 2007: 206). Our knowledge and practices bring matter to an intra-action. And these intra-actions ‘do not act in isolation . . . but rather engage in mutual intra-actions “with” one another’ (Barad, 2007: 211). Agential realism, the philosophical approach she builds from Bohr, does not argue just that ‘epistemologically’ the observer and the observed are indistinguishable. Rather it argues that they are ontologically inseparable intra-acting components (Barad, 2007: 33). In ‘phenomena’ ‘agencies are distinct in relational not an absolute sense’, that is ‘agencies are only distinct in relation to their mutual entanglement; they don’t exist as individual elements’ (Barad, 2007: 33). A result is an analysis of world through ‘matter as a dynamic and shifting entanglement of relations, rather than as a property of things’ (Barad, 2007: 35). The similarities to relational cosmology perspective (as developed here in chapter 5) are striking, although the basis for relationality is somewhat different. The similarities regarding the moves on epistemology are also worthy of note. If we are of the world we never know it from the outside but through the ‘agential cuts’ into it. All our knowledge, concepts, and actions are (in Barad’s words) ‘cuts’ into the world, intra-actions that bring about, materialize, both the universe as it processes and meaning, for meaning too is intricately material. Crucially, knowing, being, and also ethics as we come to see them are complexly intra-related. Barad puts forward a kind of onto-epistemology-ethics. ‘Embodiment is a matter not of being specifically situated in the world but rather of being of the world in its dynamic specificity’ (Barad, 2007: 377). Barad’s thought is interesting, then, also in how it challenges causality and notions of reality.³ Yet it is also in line, broadly,
³ Causality is not a question of determinism or free will here because intra-actions are constraining but not determining. Possibilities are opening up as others are excluded as we intra-act. As Barad clarifies: Crucial to agential realist conception of power is a reworking of causality as intra-activity. Indeed, what is at issue is the very nature of causal relations: causal relations do not pre-exist
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, ? 145 with our relational cosmology orientation. What is of specific interests to us here, however, is her way of diffracting ethics through this approach.
Barad on Ethics [E]thics is not a concern we add to the questions of matter, but rather is the very nature of what it means to matter. (Barad, 2012: 26) Ethics is an important diffraction, material production of the world, for Barad. Barad sets her ethics out in chapter 8 of Meeting the Universe Halfway: Believing something is true doesn’t make it true. But phenomena—whether lizards, electrons or humans—exist only as a result of, and as part of, the world’s ongoing intra-activity, its dynamic and contingent differentiation into specific relationalities . . . [T]hrough our advances, we participate in bringing forth the world in its specificity, including ourselves. We have to meet the universe halfway, to move toward what may come to be in ways that are accountable for our part in the world’s differential becoming. All real living is meeting. And each meeting matters. (Barad, 2007: 353)
What Barad is getting at here (I think!) is the idea that in a relational world where we cannot but intra-act, we are constantly implicated in the differential becoming of matter and meaning and it is responsible materialization in these relations then that ethics reside in. We have an ethical responsibility of a kind in our constant materializations and exclusions that arise thereof. ‘We are responsible not only for the knowledge we seek, but, in part, for what exists’ (Barad, 2007: 207). Now what is the content of this responsibility here, you might be wondering? I take Barad to mean by responsibility something like responsiveness with/to relational encounters, not responsibility ‘over’ ‘others’ (from some external principle). It is then, I think, akin to what Haraway calls ‘response-ability’, becoming, aware of relations, able to respond, with responsive attitude. Thus, we become responsible not because we have prior ethical commitments, or because we are but rather are intra-actively produced. What is ‘cause’ and what is ‘effect’ are intra-actively demarcated through the specific production of marks on bodies. (Barad, 2007: 236). It follows too that the conception of realism is interesting here, for this is realism, but the real does not ‘pre-exist’ the agential cuts. Concepts and reality arise in the ‘phenomena’ (which incorporate us and world) in a causal and yet non-deterministic way. We don’t then, as some poststructuralists might say, ‘sing’ our concepts or world into existence (à la, say, Steve Smith, 2011) but are intra-acting materializations at all times, even when thinking. Our concepts too then are of the universe, not ‘in’ it. Our intentions and causality too are ‘better understood as attributable to a complex network of human and nonhuman agents, including historically specific sets of material conditions that exceed the traditional notion of the individual’ (Barad, 2007: 23)
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inherently caring, or because others demand our sympathy, but rather, as Chiew puts it: ‘it is precisely because we are of the world, we ‘are the world’, that seeking to understand how our participation matters is a concern for us’ (Chiew, 2014: 66). We become responsive, recognizing of, accountable, in relations. This is why how we relate to relations matters. Awareness of relational connections makes us aware of our ethical responsivity and responsibility (which is there whether we know it or not). We ‘become’ ethically aware, of our ‘ethics’ in relations. This, crucially, may not mean that on becoming aware of cruelty to animals in mass meat production we ‘stop’ eating meat, or in acknowledging pollutant emissions of air travel that we stop flying, or that becoming aware of discursive relations which construct us all as of equal worth that we stop killing each other; yet awareness of relations makes us aware of the accountability, responsiveness to each other, and our response-ability. It presents us with responsibility to think, relate, reflect, act as we matter ourselves and others in our encounters. This is significant in part because the very idea of objects and subjects too depend on the exclusions we matter. For Barad, and our relational perspective, we do not have fixed subjects and objects, which somehow pre-exist the practices of engagement; rather, these emerge from practices of enacting. As you can probably tell, this is of consequence for how we come to think about who and what matters. As Barad emphasizes, as we focus on new societal configurations, products, knowledge the ‘very nature of who we are starts to shift’ (Barad, 2007: 363). Ethics is then an ‘iterative reconfiguring of possibilities entailed in our passional advances towards the universe’ (Barad, 2007: 364). If ethics is tied up with bringing about possibilities or closing them off through how we matter, how we relate relations, we are not uniquely placed to do ethics— the ‘uplifted humans’ (Cudworth and Hobden, 2017: 118) with unique morals and reason—but rather are part of being made ethically. Within this kind of ethics ethical questions are not just about treatment of humans (or of ‘non-humans’) but rather about how we are being ‘configured’ ethically in the intra-actions we are of (Barad, 2007: 384). In this process we do not really even have a choice about whether we matter, or do ethics, for ‘each of us’ ‘is part of intra-active ongoing articulation of the world in its differential mattering’ (Barad, 2007: 381). These matterings matter because a ‘different material-discursive apparatus of bodily production materializes a different configuration of the world, not merely a different description’ of the world (Barad, 2007: 390). In this intra-acting world, then, we are fundamentally implicated, constantly, in mattering differentially in ways which are in her terms ethically consequential. Barad emphasizes that ‘just like the human subject is not the locus of knowing, neither is it the locus of ethicality’ (Barad, 2007: 39). Barad’s account draws on Levinas to ground its post-human ‘ethics of worlding’ (Barad, 2007: 392). It is this base that allows her to argue that the nature of our
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, ? 147 embodiment exposes us to others and that this entails responsibility. Relationality is fundamental but ethics arises from the responsibilities in relations, in how we matter. So ethics is unavoidable but how we do it, how we matter, is also a question of our relations and how we relate to relations. There are no ultimate criteria for ethical action arising from outside the intra-actions or relations we are in. ‘We are of the universe—there is no inside, no outside. There is only intraacting from within and as part of the world in its becoming’ (Barad, 2007: 396). Thus, from a relational perspective such as this: [a] delicate tissue of ethicality runs through the marrow of being. There is no getting away from ethics . . . world and its possibilities of becoming are made at each moment . . . . Meeting each moment, being alive to the possibilities of becoming, is an ethical call, an invitation that is written into the very matter of all being and becoming. (Barad, 2007: 396)
Barad’s framing of ethics is rather challenging, but it is also interesting for us because it is in line with relational cosmology as developed earlier in this book. This is because Barad seeks to think ethics in relations, and in relations not of things. Here ‘ethics’ is no longer ‘out there’: in moral laws, or human properties, or our emotional responses.⁴ Instead, doing ethics is part of being responsive and response-able in the cosmos. The challenge is how we relate to, or in her words ‘diffract’, relations: that is our ‘responsibility’, or response-ability in relations (Haraway, 2016). Ethics is about ‘listening for the response of the other and an obligation to be responsive to the other, who is not entirely separate from what we call the self ’ (Barad, 2012: 26). Feeling, thinking, becoming, responsiveness, in relations is ethical. In relations, when we relate and re-relate to relations, we become concerned. Barad’s perspective is not a million miles from becoming more ‘creaturely’, as Cudworth and Hobden (2017: 117) call on us to become: ‘about developing a more sensate manner of being in the world’ (Cudworth and Hobden, 2017: 117). Nor is it very distinct from some strands of ethics of care where ‘thinking and knowing are relational processes that require care’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017: 19). And yet Barad’s ethics is not focused on care, or the critters, but provides an open horizon: one that also allows us to stretch away from ethics of care and sympathy to the critterly to recognize also their ‘strange strangeness’ in the mesh. Responseability is not just love or care, but also curiosity, and stretching. Is this an ethical position, an ethical theory? I am not sure. It certainly does not appear to me a ‘normative ethics’: a way of prescribing action or a general ⁴ Difficulties lie here too: in reduction of moral commitments to feelings of sympathy or care, not least because of the problematic history of sentimentalization of the non-human others. See Cudworth and Hobden, 2017: 119.
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normative framework or a process for generating or defending moral judgements. Nor is it a form of applied ethics. It does not ‘give us much’ by way of classical ethical theorizing. I think it may count as a kind of a meta-ethical position ‘at best’. Indeed, I would expect many normative and ethical theorists in IR to be reluctant to engage with it given its reluctance to play by the usual rules in providing us with some criteria for moral judgements or processes for generating such criteria. What do we do with this ‘ethics’, then, and how does it help, if it does, address questions of commitments in relations? And does it give us something by way of thinking on ‘human ethics’ given its interest in ethics beyond the human?
Barad and the Problem of Human Barad’s ethics arguably mesh well within the relational cosmology conception of the world as it has been developed here, and can be used to get a sense of what ethics might look like beyond ‘the human’ in a relational universe. Yet, her ethics also raise some deeply challenging questions, around the ‘usual expectations’ we have in thinking ethically. Who are the ‘agents’ of ethics here, and are they ‘intentional’? And what about the humans, what are they? Are brittlestars (ocean dwellers she uses as an example of ethicality) ethical in the same sense as we humans are in mattering the world?
Intentionality, Consciousness, and Responsibility Classically, central to discussions of ethics has been discussions of intentionality, agency, and as such also notions of human consciousness. It is precisely the human capacity to conscious decision-making which has made us moral or ethical beings in classical ethical discussions. Should we lack intent or consciousness of moral codes we are deemed less ethically liable (as ‘mentally ill’, or ‘minors’, for example are in many societies)? But in a relational cosmology view of relations and the overarching ethics of mattering the universe, we must surely be sceptical of these kinds of special invocations of our human capacities as the basis of ethics. How does Barad help us think through (or past) the notions of intentionality, consciousness, and the human as the basis of ethics? Boldly, Barad does not associate ethics with intentionality, or with causal responsibility. In fact, in her intra-acting world, interestingly, neither of these notions exist in the classical sense. For Barad, responsibilities arise from responsible facing of the other, responsible agential cut, which brings forth possibility and exclusion. This also means dissolution of ethics away from consciousness and intentionality. But can we have ethical commitments without conscious beings and, crucially, is this not undoing what is specific about the human as an ethical being?
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, ? 149 Indeed, this is where many post- or critical humanist fellow travellers too would resist Barad’s moves. They would point out that recognizing capacities of human consciousness does not need to entail that we perceive human consciousness in isolation from the rest of nature. We can see it also as very much evolved from it. As Simon Conway (in Harrison, 2010: 156) emphasizes, synapses and the nervous system evolved before humans and have wide distribution in nature. The origins of our cognitive capacities have deep roots: ‘we’d be dead if [they] didn’t’ (Conway in Harrison, 2010: 163). Others see the question of ethics as tied to the question of consciousness, if of a more rudimentary (shared) non-human kind of consciousness. For Dorion Sagan for example, the ‘ethical’ as a problem emerges when the very first Edicarans recognize others as ‘food’, as a gradient. Our ethics are a continuation of this same ethical dilemma.⁵ How do we deal with the undoing of the conscious and of the human in Barad’s ethics? In what follows, I argue, with the help of Florence Chiew, that we can both open out to ethics beyond the human and also think the human as subject of ethics. We do so by recognizing that we are, in a relational universe, processing as human and also as more than human.
Human and More than Human Chiew is interested in Barad because, for her, Barad takes on in an interesting way a fundamental problem in existing accounts of post-human ethics. Existing accounts, Chiew argues, have a tendency to see the originating source of responsibility, in the end, as a human duty to the other entities. There is a lapsing even in many tracts of post-human ethics to the human contrasted with the non-human.
⁵ In this context, quoting a lengthy passage from Dorion Sagan’s posthumanist tract clarifies this usefully, as it ties questions of consciousness directly to the origin of the problem of ethics. I want to mention quickly what I think is the basis of the ethical problem of life on Earth. It is two-fold. First, sensing, sensation, including the avoidance of cues of pain, which we may assume is among the oldest phenomenologically detectable signals, correlates with living beings. Second, Earth is essentially a material closed thermodynamic system. Like other natural complex thermodynamic systems, material cycles as energy flows, and the system, if possible, grows to use up available resources . . . But . . . there comes a time when organisms developed the potential to consider themselves individual selves. I would provisionally locate this potential chronologically with the Edicaran fauna, among the first organisms to have heads . . . They may not have been animals at all but symbiotic organisms living with algae in their tissues. But either they or the animals that followed them recognized each other as gradients. This set up an ethical crisis. Animals not only devoured each other— ‘meat’ is the name of that gradient—but their perception and intelligence allowed them to hunt. This is the same awareness that would ultimately allow us to know we harm others to feed, and that someday we will die. (Dorion Sagan, 2013: 35–6)
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She discusses Cary Wolfe’s ethics as an example. Wolfe criticizes ‘ethics’ as ‘prejudicial practice’ which tends to privilege humans. While such a critique of the humanist bias of ethics is welcomed by Chiew, for her a problem also arises: ‘how [do we] secure the distinctiveness of the qualities that have defined a specific humanism (meaning, consciousness, reason, reflection), yet simultaneously situate them beyond their conventional human identifications?’ (Chiew, 2014: 56). Referring to disability ethics, Wolfe emphasizes the extension of human capacities, such as acute visuality of the autistic, as ways of connecting humans with the trans-species compassion. For him, we share with other animals visuality, consciousness of certain kinds, and appreciation of these kinds of capacities, differential as they are (among humans and between humans and non-humans). Thus, these qualities can become the basis for a different kind of relations between species. Wolfe conceptualizes how ethically bound the human is to other forms of life, bound ‘in our shared vulnerability, to other living beings who think and feel, live and die, have needs and desires, and require care just as we do’ (Chiew, 2014: 60). This kind of ethics is not based on ability, activity, agency, or empowerment but ‘on a compassion that is rooted in our vulnerability and passivity’ (Wolfe, quoted in Chiew 2014: 60), a ‘suffering together’ (Chiew, 2014: 61). But Chiew rightly criticizes this seemingly radical formulation for being invested in the ontological status of humans as human animals, from which responsibility to non-human arises. In her words, ‘Wolfe’s approach to the notion of trans-species connectivity remains wedded to a rather linear and derivative sense of human compassion toward non-human others’ (Chiew, 2014: 61). Should we not develop a better, more consistent notion of human specificity as part of ‘life as something of a general sensorium . . . a trans species being in the world’ (Chiew, 2014: 61). To model the way in which we are ‘always’ connected, Chiew turns to Barad. For Barad of course we are fully entangled part of the world, as human and otherwise: ‘Barad’s argument reminds us that to destabilize the self-certainty of humanism is to acknowledge that the human is an expression of the apparatus of life and world constantly taking a measurement of itself ’ (Chiew, 2014: 65). Humans are not separate, even in their differential agential cuts, from the world they are of. By pointing this out, Chiew helps us realize that Barad, in fact, can help us to understand not just the limits of human but also something about the specificity of the human. In Barad’s frame, we do not (according to Chiew): relinquish our sense of personal agency because, after all, our intentions and interventions are determined by the ongoing structuration of the world. Rather, it is precisely because we are the world we seek to understand that our participation matters. (Chiew, 2014: 66)
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, ? 151 Ethics here is not in any sense originated from the ‘outside’: it is part of the ontology of life in which we are cut. And, crucially, our life is (currently) cut by ‘human’ and ‘ethical’. In other words, while Barad allows us to think beyond the specificity of the human—limits of ethics is not necessarily ‘configured by the human’ (Chiew, 2014)—in her emphasis on entanglements she is also able to emphasize the specificity of human entanglements. The point is not to deny or collapse the distinctions that are drawn between human and non-human animals. Rather, the more provocative suggestion here is that the perceived errors of humanism are also already facets of Life’s determination to organize itself, understand itself, to be present to itself—even in its missteps. How we make sense of our relations in the world—in fact, how we are the world making itself—constitutes enduring questions about the nature of sociality, that is, the ontological inseparability of nature and humanity. (Chiew, 2014: 67)
The question of ethics is, then, not how we are ethical but how are we produced ethically (Chiew, 2014: 67), including how we produce ourselves and humans ethically in relations ‘with’ and ‘beyond’ the human. If what determines an ethical call cannot be defined outside, or prior to, the instance of a moral quandary, if the ethical does not pre-exist the scene of violation or error but is constitutive of it, then ethical inquiry is an expression of the myriad ways by which Life bears itself. (Chiew, 2014: 67)
Ethics emerges from our ‘cuts’, and lives in our cuts in the relational universe. And ethics is itself a cut in the world as a way of mattering the world. This is why it matters not only how we think ethics but also practise it. If we practise ethics by producing general criteria and expectations for ‘human’ actions, that is one way of cutting ethics, and humans, into the world; if we practise Baradian ethics beyond the human with responsibility to those in relations, that is a different way of cutting ethics into the world. In such ethical cuts, we cannot then reify the human but nor can we reify the non-human. We are in the Baradian ‘differential becoming of the world’—human and non-human—both, and neither ‘essential’. Yet, in our configuring of relations we are also legacies of and necessarily ‘diffracting’ from our relations, human and non-human. Recognizing this is important because it allows us to gain some sense of the specificity of the human as it relates to ethics. We become aware of specificity of humanity, not just as a ‘language game’ (Pin Fat, 2013: 8) but also as a way of intra-acting responsibilities to humans and non-humans. We are human as we have been configured humans ethically, differentially, universally, relationally,
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multiply; indeed we configure the human in various different ways. Humans do not just ‘exist’ and then think ethically; humans are also made in how we do ethics and it matters how we matter the human and ethics for different kinds of humans and ethics appear from these matterings. This is ultimately why thinking hard on the human, rather than bypassing it, is so important, and also why addressing ‘humanist ethics’ is far from irrelevant from such a perspective. Not only is the human being built onto our world, our ethics, our international politics, but also how we matter the humans, ethically too, matters for ‘humans’, and also of course the ‘non-humans’—and their complex power relations. Humanity is of the world but it is not singular. It is not simply ‘natural’, and it is not only a ‘social construction’. Given the messiness and dynamism of the human, and its uses in mattering the world, we have every reason to engage, very seriously, also with ‘human ethics’, alongside being sceptical of purely human ethics. How we do so, that is, how we come back to a conversation with more classical forms of humanist ethics, is less clear for me, at this stage. What does this perspective do to our way of thinking or practising human rights for example? I suppose we might see human rights activism or normative debate on this as constituting ‘cuts’ making ethical commitments and humans of a certain kind, and on a certain basis, possible. While such cuts can bring ‘rights’ they can also involve exclusions both within the human and in particular with regard to the nonhuman. It is responsibility to these exclusions as well as the effects of the cuts that we must attend to in a relational universe. And this is not responsibility in the abstract or responsibility to norms or care; but response-ability to how we relationally cut ‘others’ with our ethical claims. This perspective may seem lacking in generalizability and as such usefulness for some, for we do not have clear-cut rules or judgements to follow, or processes for coming to them to follow, but even so my hunch is that this perspective is not irrelevant to ethical and normative reflections in the field even as this is less than an ethical or normative framework of a classical type. This orientation generates some important set of reflections on how we make the world in relations, via ethics, via the human. Perhaps we can come to ‘humanist ethics’ and its dilemmas too anew from here. Does seeing the limits of human ethics from this perspective help understand the role of general ethical judgements or standards in a new light? Does it allow us to re-evaluate how we cut the world through ethical criteria of judgement? Does it drive us towards more positional contextual ethical responsibilities, a different kind of ethical sensibility? Laura Zanotti thinks so. In a recent book (2018) and a related article (2017) Zanotti argues, based on engagement with Barad’s ethics, that in an entangled world where ‘humans are not detached’ (2018: 6) and where we begin ‘from relations instead of entities’ (2018: 6), ethical and political decisions and how we justify them are altered. They involve necessarily ‘uncertainty and situated
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, ? 153 engagements, the soundness of which cannot be adjudicated mainly based on abstract normativity’ (2018: 7). This is of consequence not least because Zanotti perceives dangers and unethicality in universal aspirations and general principles (2018: 9). We must instead open up to ‘positional’ ethics in which we can recognize the uncertainties and need for creativity in our own actions. ‘Ethics’ here requires ‘paying attention to what is the case in specific situations and the inclusions/exclusions of the ontological cuts we operate’ (Zanotti, 2018: 9). Here ‘ethics’ is not ‘a matter of following rules but . . . a game of discovery and responsibly pushing the limits of what we assume is the case’ (Zanotti, 2018: 10). Relational orientation then makes a difference to ethics; although crucially not a difference of an easily generalizable kind as no specific new moral codes are invoked. Nevertheless, we can see an interesting new angle here, for further fruitful debate on how to come not only to ethical creativity but also to ethics of ‘prudence’, a debate of interest not only for relational thinkers but also for classical realists and critical theorists.
Re-relating to Relations—without Ethics? Despite all the difficulties, perhaps we have worked our way back to something we ‘recognize’: from beyond the human to the importance of how humans make the world through ethics; from concern with general principles to more situational notions of ethics. And we have done so without letting go of the ‘brittlestar’ as ethical, as responsible in the universe. But what we have not, perhaps curiously, considered is the possibility of nonethical being/becoming; relating without ethics; cutting into relations without ethics. To my mind, we should at least consider this, especially if ethics is made, in part, in our troublesome relations with humanity, including its various exclusions and power relations. In the previous chapters I suggested that our challenge, from a relational perspective developed here, is how to relate to relations, and how to allow for possibilities of ‘re-relating to the mesh’ as we stretch ourselves and our understandings in relations. But is ethics a useful, or the only, vocabulary/form of mattering for (re-) relating? While Barad makes an interesting case for thinking ethics in the mesh as we become responsive in relations, I am not convinced that ethics is necessarily how we need to relate to the mesh. Recognizing this is important because it could be argued that in a sense (not discussed by Barad) relations ‘come before ethics’. In a relational universe, we do not (need to) derive our commitments from ethics; ethics is a language/mattering which (may or may not) emerge from our relationalities. But it is (perhaps) not essential or primary to being or thinking
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or to relating. In a field where normative theorists have only recently won the hard-won victory for recognition of ubiquity of ethics, across IR perspectives (see e.g. Reus-Smit and Snidal, 2008), this may seem an impertinent, perhaps even a dangerous suggestion. From this perspective however we must keep open the possibility that ethics is not the be-all-and-end-all of creating, cutting, making, responding, caring, relating in a relational universe but only one (or perhaps rather many) historically and contextually specific ways of so doing.
Coming Back to Ethics and IR What does this kind of an ethical perspective bring to discussions of ethics in IR? First, I think it highlights that we could open up room for different ways of thinking and doing ethics in IR, international political theory, and normative theory vis-à-vis the more classical traditions. We could think more on how we might come to ethics anew from positions far beyond, and in awkward but fruitful conversation with, the more classical positions whether cosmopolitan, communitarians, and something in between. We may also have some tools here to go beyond ethics of care, or to enter into a different type of conversation with defenders of the critterly, or indeed of prudence, as Zanotti (2018) reminds us. Yet, to do ethics we need not even be interested in general moral or ethical rules, or processes, derived from reason or duty, or validity of such rules generally or even in specific instances or events. Instead, we have new openings to think about ‘positional’ responsibilities, creativities of our cuts in relations (Zanotti, 2018). We are concerned with opening to relations and coming back to ‘human(ist) ethics’ from somewhere else. These conversations may not be very easy or comfortable but they are important. In IR the development of relational cosmology then seems to point to development of more open, worldly, entangled, ethical horizons. A number of such have been in development in recent years, but within these, some more than others strike a chord. It is interesting to note that, for example, Anthony Burke’s security cosmopolitanism (2013b; 2015; 2017) —an important effort to revisit national and collective security from a positioning of security into relations of shared vulnerability on the planet and indeed in the cosmos—is not an easy fit with our reflections here. Despite his interest in relationality, planetary vulnerabilities beyond humans, and new ways of thinking ethical commitments from there—striking sympathies with our interests—his perspective seems to aspire to a level of generality and ‘wholeness’ in application of ethics that seems to be denied by the view of relations explored here. His perspective seems to lift us off the planet to see our shared fate and then come back to it with an interest in a (new) universalist ethical framework derived from a ‘global’ sense of threats thus perceived. But we do not work with
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, ? 155 ethics at these scales of generality or obligation here because we have explored not a cosmopolitan universe but a relational one. We work with relational responsibility, or response-ability (Haraway 2016); we consider carefully how we make the world and in so doing become responsive and response-able. The ambition of security cosmopolitanism, while appealing, seems also somewhat too expansive, too universal, too ‘lifted’, from relations. In many regards the sensibility developed here is closer to Audra Mitchell’s concern with ‘worldly harm’ (2014a). Like her, we see humans and non-humans co-constituting each other; we have opened to the possibility of not only critiquing anthropocentrism, we have also imagined new ontologies of human and nonhuman (co-)existence. Her concern with harm done beyond individuals, human, or non-human, is suggestive of the kind of concerns we too seem to have, highlighting the need to think ethics ‘in the mesh’, a wider totality of relations of concern. I am also sympathetic to Mitchell’s (2014a: 16) concern with a need to work with abstract notions, not to flatten ethics to immediate connections in localities. We have emphasized ‘relatedness’ here but this relatedness in the mesh need not be ‘immediate’; it can also shoot through levels and scales, from the local to global, planetary and beyond. Thus, in the mesh, it is not the case that re-relating to a toad dying of pollution relates us only to the toad and its immediate surroundings; rather in the mesh, dealing with strange strangers, we are also immediately called upon to abstract about them (the toad is not readily accessible to us) and beyond them to think of what makes them (the related mesh includes global economy of chemical exports, climate change, etc. all requiring careful abstraction). Mitchell’s call, then, to connect relational ethics with abstraction is important: it is from the abstractions that concepts which can evoke powerful reactions to become response-able emerge. Yet, arguably our concerns are somewhat less ‘whole worldly’ and also somewhat more disruptive of the notion of ethics itself than Mitchell’s more ‘pragmatically’ oriented approach. We are if you like in line with Mitchell’s more recent concern with generating new forms of ‘ethico-political creativity’ (Mitchell, 2017: 19). From this perspective on ethics, we are called to develop ethical commitments as we relate in the mesh, as we feel the mesh, as we re-relate to the mesh. Thus to be in the mesh, ethically, is to be creative, dynamic, open, ready to commit, not from general moral principles, but from relations. This ‘ethics’ (if we can call it that) will perhaps be disturbing to some readers. It has no general rules or mores. We are not responsible to God or duty or the state, nor to abstract reason or our empathetic feelings. We are also not responsible solely to the human, or its abstract categories or moral commitments alone. Our response-abilities shoot through ‘humans’. And we are multiple in our multiple relationalities, not singular, defined, confined. We are porous and smeared; also in our ethical commitments.
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But how can we, from such a perspective, judge whether a strike in Iraq was ethical or unethical? How can we from such a perspective judge whether we can torture in the name of the state, or whether we have global commitments to all humans, or all sentient animals? What bases do we have to answer important ethical questions such as these? One of the key insights of a relational approach is that it forces us to be sceptical of the notion that there are general, non-situated, non-related answers—or indeed questions—about ethics. But this does not mean—as Zanotti (2018) so powerfully shows—that we do not have ethical judgements. We do, but positionally, situatedly, entangled-ly, relationally. And if anything, these are more intense than commitments derived from general rules, which may in ‘detachment’ lead us to deny our responsibility for our actual acts/thoughts/cuts in the world (Zanotti, 2018: 108). As I try and relate to the world, I also commit to its strange strangers, wondering about them, seeking to know about them, getting concerned for them, locally and not just locally (for what is local in the mesh of connections anyway?). I do this in the mesh without prescribed ethical answers, and yet our cuts are inevitable and as such our commitments as porous beings in the mesh can be and often are intense. Yet, my commitments to a spider, or a toad, or humans do not arise from general rules, but from our relational processing and the responsiveness and response-ability this generates as we think, act, and reflect on relations. How we ask and what we ask as ethical questions is relational and matters as much as the answers we give. This has significance for what matters also in ethics in IR or how ethics matters IR. Why do we discuss ethics of just war rather than ethics of global use of coal? Why do ethics of intervention in another ‘state’ matter but not the ethics of intervention in a forest ecosystem (perhaps by the same intervening force)? Whose ethics and interests are thus mattered as mattering? Why should we even try to think ethically across global humanity and what does this do, to humans and non-humans, differentially positioned in our variegated ‘human’ commitments? How do we think ethically with forests, with fish, with bacteria and how does that affect our negotiations of climate change, Brexit, and global health policies? Through asking such ethical questions, and seeking to answer them in conversation with humanist ethics (but also seeking to stretch beyond it), we may come to see relations we have not considered and our commitments to the world are no less passionate, committed, concerned than if we had a universal moral rule. And we may even come to think and act beyond ethics if we dare. From the relational cosmology perspective we do not start with ethics; we have come to ask about ethics from relations. Relating and re-relating to relations perhaps is, for us, a more foundational challenge for a relational thinking and becoming than ‘ethics’. Indeed, ironically we may become limited in how we relate to relations
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, ? 157 through ethics. Thus, we are also directed to think on the limitations of ethics, as Maja Zehfuss (2018) has also recently called on us to do. If ethics is not a sublime category of existence but simply of the relations we are of, we perhaps cannot but ‘relate’ to the world through it, but we need to also bear in mind the limits of ethics as a way of diffracting ourselves and others in the world.
Conclusion: Relational Ethics Our moral values, our emotions, our loves are no less real for being part of nature, for being shared with the animal world, or for being determined by the evolution which our species has undergone over millions of years. Rather they are more valuable as a result of this: they are real. They are the complex reality of which we are made . . . Our reality is made up of societies, of the emotion inspired by music, of the rich intertwined networks of the common knowledge which we have constructed together. All of this is part of the self-same ‘nature’ which we are describing. We are an integral part of nature; we are nature, in one of its innumerable . . . expressions. That which makes us specifically human does not signify our separation from nature; it is part of that self-same nature.’ (Rovelli, 2014: 74) We started the chapter with Smolin’s invocations of ethics, commitments, and responsibility which foregrounded the death of God, the relationality we are in, the groundedness in where we are, where we judge. The initial thinking on ethics developed here is in line with some aspects of his reflections. Yet the discussion developed in this chapter also goes beyond Smolin’s (implied) ethical reflections. We do not only the judge ‘each other’ (as humans) and we are not only ethical (humans). I have sought to, through Barad and Chiew, show that a critical humanist ethics can engage ethics, albeit with some difficulty. Where are we left by this perspective? In what seems (by classical measures of clear criteria for moral judgements) free-fall. No certainties, no rules, no particular feelings of compassion have been specified for us. No final subjects or objects of this ethics have been specified. We are human and non-human, and multiple in multiple relations. What responsibilities arise from this is unclear, unfixed. What kinds of decisions we should make are left open. Yet, these ethics are also very intense, and create wide-reaching commitments, response-abilities. They are then not nihilistic or relativistic; they are real, passionate and committed, in the world and of the world. A number of critics of new materialism implicate a post-human ethics as well as the very relation to the world of new materialism with a conservatism or
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reproduction of capitalist order. For them the emphasis on relationality is exactly the kind of undoing of autonomous actors, which allows responsibility of humans to be undone, to be excused from being judged (see Schmidt, 2013; Chandler, 2015). As Jessica Schmidt (2013: 180) powerfully argues, there is a movement away from moral accountability and responsibility to a kind of ‘material accountability’. I agree that we need to be mindful of the consequences, and the exclusions, which emerge from how we relate and re-relate to the world around us, including through this way of cutting ethics and humans. Many worries no doubt fill the minds of readers, as they do mine. Yet, relational cosmology does provoke us to worry in a different way, about different things: not just about what happens to universal human rights or general standards but also about exclusions of generalized ways of cutting the world and for the consequences of each cut in the world. And we worry about or are wary of the ‘heaviness’ of the legacy of ethics on our thought and action as ‘humans’. If we are in a process of re-relating, in this process, we should perhaps not so readily return to God or his (secular) disciples. As we grapple with our ‘realisms’ and with each other, human and non-human, we are presented with no easy answers, but we do have a chance to ‘think away’, to recalibrate our commitments and to re-relate—to relationalities in and of this universe. This is an opportunity to not just re-prescribe, to dictate, to feel obligated, but also to open up, to commit anew, to make new kin in a relational universe.
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7 Reorienting to the International, the Global and the Planetary I have deliberately sought to take the reader ‘elsewhere’ to a relational universe in order to allow a reorientation to the subject matters of International Relations. But what happens when we come back to think politics, international politics, and indeed the discipline of International Relations from the relational cosmos? What tools, conceptual or otherwise, does this orientation give us? Do we think politics or international politics anew with it and if so how? What do we ‘do with it’? The aim of this chapter is to take some of the insights from the previous chapters and place them in the context of scholarly analysis and reflection on politics and international relations. We also tackle IR (the ‘discipline’) for IR’s vision of itself, and its conceptual tools and foci, are not only cosmologically implicated but also important for the possibilities of thinking anew cosmologically. Disciplines like IR, and our scholarly vocabularies, matter for how we relate to the world. My aim here is to show that we are called on to reorient to politics, international politics, and ‘IR’ from the relational cosmology framing that we have developed. Indeed, we see that classical IR vocabularies are problematic in part due to their cosmological background assumptions and thus I seek to open up via relational cosmology some new vocabularies—around planetary politics for example—for IR to engage and study the world anew. I also hold on to some ‘old’ concepts— democracy, for example—seeking to reconstitute its meaning in a new relational orientation. My choices of what to hold on to and what to ‘do away with’ are not intended as final delineations or attempts to ‘ground’ a new perspective in specific concepts. Indeed, I can see how there might be some good reasons to hold on to the global—deflated here—and good reasons to stretch away from concepts of democracy or even politics. Yet, the primary aim here is not to resolve ‘where to start’ but to provide a three-fold provocation one could generate from relational cosmology in order to open up things anew. This is then, not meant as a ‘new paradigm’, ‘metaphysics’, or ‘ideology’ for IR to ‘follow’ but a reorientation from which we might see things slightly differently so as to stretch further, think anew. I develop three sets of arguments. First, I explore the troublesome nature of the ‘international’ and the ‘global’ in IR, arguing that a move to the notion of ‘planetarity’ in recent scholarship is promising. I first discuss the investment of the international in Newtonian
International Relations in a Relational Universe. Milja Kurki, Oxford University Press (2020). © Milja Kurki. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198850885.001.0001
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reference points and also its deep humanist underpinnings which ‘lift’ the state and the international ‘above’ the background of the planet. I also deal with the troublesome trope of ‘globality’ as an alternative to the gaze of the ‘international’ and argue that this too is problematic from our perspective for ‘closing’ the world and failing to open up its relationalities beyond the human. In order to facilitate opening up to other forms of relations and relationalities, I point towards the promise of a ‘planetary’ perspective. Yet, if the meanings of globality are contested (see e.g. Chakrabarty, 2018), we must also pay attention to how the notion of planetarity is subject to important contestations over what it should entail. In the second section, then, I try to tease out some of the tensions and the stakes involved in moving towards a planetary orientation by focusing on the important and intriguing debate on ‘planet politics’ in recent IR scholarship (Burke et al., 2016; Chandler et al., 2017; Fishel et al., 2017). I seek to show how our relational cosmology perspective can help in orienting to the debate and its tensions. Overall, I am sympathetic to the development of planetary politics in IR (if not planet politics in the singular): there are certain openings facilitative of a more relational orientation within this perspective/debate. The move to the planetary carries the promise of bringing IR back into the wider world (from its own lifted human world) and thus may enable us to see the much wider negotiations of relations—connecting (and constructing) humans but also plants, geophysical systems, animals, ecologies, bacteria—that ‘human’ existence, and states’ existence ultimately relies on. This helps us orient to making sense of IR in the age of the ‘Anthropocene’ (see discussed e.g. in Dalby, 2014; Eckersley, 2017; Harrington, 2016; Corry 2017; Chandler, 2018). However, I also set out some cautionary warnings as to how we might use the notion to reorient in and around IR. A relational orientation to planetarity should refuse the repeated attempts by IR planet politicians to ‘lift’ us off the planet. And we should also not ground purely in the ‘terran’ as if our relations were closed ‘on’ the planet. We should keep alive a relational relating which does not glorify us or the planet and does not singularize humans or the planetary. To assist in the process of thinking through what a planetary orientation to IR might mean, and to help think through how we might relate ‘politically’ on the planet today, the third section discusses how we might think democratic politics in the context of the planetary. I remain open to politics via democracy, even as democracy as we know it is challenged here. I try to map out ways in which we can and should develop a less anthropocentric vision of democracy ‘planetarily’ (not domestically or internationally) from a relational orientation. My aim here is to show that a number of interesting ways of thinking through and practicing democracy and politics are opened up by an engagement with relational cosmology and critical humanism. These openings may help us relate to ‘politics’ as well as ‘who and what matters’ in new ways as we face the challenges of the planetary
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‘social nature’ (Burke et al., 2016) in all its challenging manifestations. Indeed, through a discussion of expressions around Brexit fisheries negotiations I try to show what is closed off and opened up by our cosmological frameworks of thought in terms of what matters and how we should do politics. I seek to show through these three arguments that, in each case, the relational cosmology perspective helps us reorient in certain important ways. The ‘re-relating to relations’ it encourages is neither straightforwardly reformist or transformationalist for IR by standard terms (Young, 2016). It is committed to exploring relations and concepts, but also interested in ‘queering’ how we might develop new relational, ‘less anthropocentric’ visions within which we may raise new puzzles, ask new questions, and find new commitments.
From the Global to the Planetary International Relations has been enthralled by two key concepts in its first century of study: the international and the global. While the discipline has classically been framed around inter-state relations and the unique challenges presented by the ‘international’, since 1970s the notions of globalization, global political forces, global capitalism, global elites, global environmental problems and more recently global challenges have raised the image of the ‘globe’ and ‘globality’ on to IR’s agenda. The images of Earth and various projects to build common humanity on the planet have rendered the planet, humanity, and politics ‘global’ (for discussion of creation of globality see e.g. van Munster and Sylvest, 2016). The aspiration to embrace the global is still rightly challenged by the advocates of the ‘international’: those that argue that interstate politics still rules in the world political system, and (much more interestingly in my eyes) those who argue that we are yet to understand what the international ‘is’ (Rosenberg, 2016; Davenport, forthcoming). Yet, I argue here that as paradigmatic centre grounds, these two concepts—the international and the global—are both delimited, and limiting, on our ability to relate to relations that matter for subject matters of IR. More promise is provided by the notion of the planetary.
The International and the Global It is no surprise that the discipline of International Relations should have as its key organizing concept the notion of ‘international’. For the realists the international is the summation of the problem of anarchy: it captures the inability to ‘cooperate’, and to commit, across borders. For liberals it is the playground of interests: where states play out their interest-seeking in various modes.
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The international in the classical paradigms of IR is captured by the idea of inter-state politics: unlike ‘domestic’ politics where cooperation and interestmediation take place, in the international sphere brutal demands of survival and dominance play out, albeit, for the liberals, under the confines of international institutional mediation. But the international has not been an uncontested grounding concept in IR. As has been argued by critics—from feminists to Marxists—the ‘international’ is, in many ways, an invention—in that it is the summation and a reification of the ‘national’ onto the ‘globe’—but also it is an invention which serves some interests more than others. The Marxists, for example, pointed to the ways in which the ‘international’ comes to justify class rule and the feminists argued that the ‘international’ reproduces power structures: reproduces nationalism, hides the role of states as managers of capital, and, for feminists, effectively hides the role of women in the maintenance of the ‘international’ political structure. Others take issue with the international for different reasons. Ashley (1988) and Walker (1993) for example saw the international as constituted by discourses of inside and outside, endemic to IR, but arbitrary in the linguistic construction of ‘international’ as well as national realities. Audra Mitchell (2014b), more recently, argues that the international is a kind of a human invention which allows ‘humans’ to go on. She argues that through actions like ‘international intervention’, humans try to ‘prove to themselves’ that they are uniquely human, above the planet, in control. In this view, the international is in a sense a conceptual device through which the humans have lifted themselves onto and also above the planet (and its other inhabitants). For these perspectives the international is not innocent. The international is a wedding onto the world of the image of the state and the political imagination that humans can exist only within and through the state. The international is the embodiment of this imagined reality. I agree with them. The international is not innocent. It is a particular edifice, for political imagination and practice, but also for cosmological markers, meanings, and structures. Indeed, the international was not only built out of cosmological beliefs heavily influenced by Newtonian assumptions, as Bentley Allan (2018) so deftly records, this cosmology also encodes, as William Bain argues, particular theological commitments in a secular guise (Bain, forthcoming). Both Allan and Bain help us grapple with the notion that the international order is built on cosmological and theological conceptual visions, about the universe, about the character and role of humans, about the limits of politics. It thus structures, enacts, or matters the world into being in particular ways. The role of the state is central to the international. It was the transformation of the Christian God’s and Church’s role in society that facilitated the rise of the ‘state’ as the new (seemingly secular) ‘sovereign’ and thus facilitated the rise of a liberal society and state (see e.g. McPherson, 1977). In this context, the international
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became a kind of a new (secularly divine) structure emergent from and upholding the state: through the expansion of the state system the notion of the international is imposed upon the planet, embedding into the world the role of ‘states’ and, crucially, via them ‘humans’ as actors of ‘politics’ within states. What the international does then, it could be argued, is embed the state as a lifted community of humans onto the sphere of the planet, the globe. Through the international we are, if you like, ‘locked in’ to an uplifted status, role and commitments as ‘humans’, and as ‘political beings’ vis-à-vis ‘states’. And international is the abstraction that allows for this domination of the state, and via it the human polis defined by sovereignty, the new divinity, to ‘go on’, to be justified and to be reified. And practices such as international intervention, as Mitchell powerfully argues (2014b), allow in this cosmological order for us to continue to think that ‘we’ are in charge of the world: agents uniquely capable of acting, controlling, saving. The international is pervasive, it is cosmologically embedded and cosmologically consequential for how we think the human part of the universe, and also thus for how we imagine others and our relations with others in the universe. It is because we are lifted that the ‘environment’, ‘resources’, ‘material goods’, ‘the planet’ become a ‘background’ to our play ‘on it’. And it is the human world of international politics where things of human kind move against the configuration space of a map, anarchy, or empty space. This is why we need to reckon with the international, and as such also with IR. It matters how it came to be and it matters how it delimits our cosmological notions. Crucially, for our purposes, relationalities, imaginations of relations, in the international relations of such kind are necessarily delimited. As was argued in the previous chapter, a kind of a Newtonian universe of things, moving against backgrounds emerges, not only in politics in the domestic sphere but also internationally. The international then is a problematic, or rather is not an unproblematic, starting point for thinking IR from a relational cosmology perspective. But if the international seemed like the limit of thinking international politics, this is no longer the case. A new concept is on the block: challenging the pressing demands of the international. Global activism, global problems, global ethics: global discourses have emerged since the 1970s especially prominently in IR. ‘The academy’s most overtly “international” discipline is finally going “global” ’ (Go and Lawson, 2017: 1). But what is the global? This is not as straightforward a question as it appears. Not only have there been long-running debates about whether the global exceeds the international and what globalization as such can mean (see e.g. Hirst and Thompson, 2002; Hay and Marsh, 2002), but much further than this debate the very meaning of this notion is surprisingly difficult to grasp. Anna Tsing’s ethnography of the global helps us in this regard. Global connections, she admits, seem to be everywhere, from global relations of production to
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global environmental activism. But the global is also a universal marker, which in and of itself ‘does’ nothing: we must remember that the global emerges, she argues, from the actual heterogeneous encounters (Tsing, 2005: 5). Tsing’s interest in ‘local’ frictions—how the global is made through concrete interactions in the world—then is not an attempt to deny globalization. Nor is ‘friction’ slowing ‘globalization’ down. Rather what she calls friction, the concrete interaction, is ‘required to keep the global power in motion’ (Tsing, 2005: 6). Global as a universal creates connections but it is also not a ‘thing’ but created by the actual connections, which lend ‘it’ force. Van Munster and Sylvest (2016) on the other hand are interested in the projects, imaginations and efforts to render the world global, a whole. Globality is not a fact but is ‘bound up with the historical and cultural practices through which the “wholeness” arises’ (van Munster and Sylvest, 2016: 2). What they try to do in their edited book The Politics of Globality since 1945 is to trace the ways in which globality is made and the varied and contested politics of globe making. Their analytical efforts are not, as such, aimed at challenging the notion of globality. Chakrabarty (2018), equally, is interested in deciphering what kinds of globality are imagined in debates on globalization and climate change. But in his recent work Latour (2017) takes even more serious issue with the Globe. The Globe stands for us as the image of the perfect sphere, the whole, the unified, the singular, the connected one. Drawing on Sloterljik’s critique of the Globe, Latour puts his critique sharply. The vision of the Globe and the ‘global’ draws on a Godly unity of ‘people’ on ‘the planet’ and imagines it as if we could know it in totality from the outside. As Latour notes: where are you when you are looking at a globe, when you look at the world as a sphere? . . . Do you believe in God or something? . . . There is no global view! And if there is no global view, you are always inside. The Globe is a sort of a remnant of a political theology. (Latour, cited in Salter and Walters, 2016: 12–13)
As Latour develops his critical humanist notion of the Gaia, ‘the globe’ becomes explicitly not seen as a ‘one’: it is not a ‘system’, or a ‘whole’ but a series of relations, contingently relating. Gaia is multiple and it is because of this that ‘Gaia is the great power of deflation. It is the thorn that deflates all the obsessions of the Globe’ (Latour, 2016: 289). The Earthlings live in relations, but none of them simply in ‘global social relations’ on ‘the globe’. Like Latour, Haraway (2016) too is worried about the assumption of unity and wholeness, and God’s eye perspectives required to perceive such. And beyond that, for her, (Latour’s) Gaia too hides an autopoietic, self-sustaining systemic notion. But the globe, and also Gaia, are made up of multiple contingent relations, Haraway argues. As a result, she too avoids the language of globality, preferring instead to speak of ‘humus’, the ‘compost’, the ‘string figures’, the ‘relations’. Each
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of these terms is trying to explicitly challenge the ‘lifting’ of humans and their ‘global’ social relations from relations beyond such—the real, material, grounded, of the planet relations which reproduce being. Given criticisms of globality, it is perhaps not surprising that in both Latour’s and Haraway’s writing another interesting concept marks the spot of, but also the critique of the ‘global’. This deserves closer attention. The alternative to the ‘global’ in these works seems to be the notion of the ‘planetary’.
The Planetary For Latour, Haraway, and also William Connolly (2017) it is facing ‘the planetary’ that has become the central aim in the fracturing of the ‘global’. Yet, curiously these authors do not dedicate a great deal of space to discuss what they mean by the notion of ‘planetary’ even as their frequent use of it seems to imply that they wish to emphasize the groundedness, ecological, material, shared, and multiplicitous nature of all being on the planet. This concept, then, is of interest to us: it marks a shift to a more relational universe of concepts and also marks the disinterest in breaking apart humans and the ‘humus’ that they are of. William Connolly comes the closest to ‘defining’ the term planetary. It is for him: a series of temporal force fields, such as climate patterns, drought zones, the ocean conveyor system, species evolution, glacier flows, and hurricanes that exhibit self-organising capacities to varying degrees and that impinge upon each other and human life. (Connolly, 2017: 4)
The planetary is a marker, then, of what Morton (2013) calls the ‘hyperobjects’, something which exist beyond the human both in scale and temporality and something which brings to question the human and the Anthropos. And interestingly Connolly sees planetary as a complementary marker: many of us now feel compelled to add a planetary dimension to the study of local, regional and global politics . . . That means that we seek to fold into our work close attention to multiple imbrications between, say, regional and global politics and a variety of planetary forces that impinge on them. (Connolly, 2013a: 402)
Yet, despite this definition, the notion of ‘planetary’ is left surprisingly vague: its contrast to the global, for example, is not developed in detail. Also, there are clearly controversies within this ‘planetary’ vision. The contrasting emphases on self-organization by Connolly (2017) and Latour (2017) and on the sympoietic by
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Haraway’s (2016) is notable. There is considerable room for contestation within what the planetary entails conceptually it would seem. I agree with Harraway, Latour, and Connolly that the notion of the planetary provides an interesting alternative term to the international and the global for describing the condition of thought and being of relevance to the political totality we experience. This is for two main reasons. First, unlike the globe, or the international, the planetary implies directly the connection of all forms of life, human and non-human, and the connection of all life to non-living processes. In this regard it challenges the implicit assumption that only states matter and also that only global ‘social’ relations matter. Second, the planetary is a term attuned to relationalities. By deflating the singularity of ‘the globe’, ‘planet-arity’ is effective in emphasizing the relational nature of being, acting, thinking, experiencing, knowing. Yet, we should prefer the notion planetary over the planet as the reference point. Let us note that the notion of ‘the planet’ has two difficult effects in our conceptual frame. First, it has a tendency to singularize the planet as if it was a ‘thing’, a ‘singular totality’. In our frame we should be wary of giving the planet a ‘thingified’ status. Indeed, perhaps as Haraway argues the planet is not even ‘an autopoietic system’ but made in relational relations which render it symbiotic (with proton masses, chemical cycles on and off the planet, gravitational relations in the solar system and beyond, solar activity, relations with inter-galactic dust clouds). As Haraway argues (2016), there is a danger in the planetary understood as the ‘planet’ coming to unify our understanding of what is going on in and of the planet. The notion of the planetary, then, more effectively indicates connection, relation, intra-action, and it makes it impossible for ‘the planet’ to be telling us things (discussed below). The planetary is not like a new term for the ‘globe’, but rather should be treated as a plural relational notion. Second, relatedly, while the planetary as it is used by Haraway and Latour is helpful, it also should be critically evaluated for what it ‘does’ to the vision of relationality of those that use it. Striking to me about the planetary in Haraway and Latour is the celebration of the biological, the terran, the Earthly in this notion: indeed, the planetary has come to, arguably, to glorify the planetary life on ‘Earth’. This, for me, also runs some risks: of glorifying the living, the biological, over the rest of the relationalities that make, shape, and process planetary relations (including extra-planetary forces). The reason I find this important to note is that I see a theological vision of the ‘special terran human’ still hiding in Latour’s earthlings and Haraway’s compostists. Relational cosmology provides us, I think, a check on this. Just because we might be sceptical of ‘sky-gazing Homo’ (Haraway, 2016: 2) who looks for ‘God’ or ‘Nature’s Laws’ to justify his special place and domination over animals (see also Harari, 2016), and just because cosmological relationalities ground us on the
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planet and do not ‘lift us up’ to the universe, this does not mean that we should end up in a new form of planet glorification, which drives ‘life glorification’ and ultimately, I fear, also human glorification.
In Sum, so Far From a relational cosmology perspective, something is amiss with IR’s vocabularies, its central concepts. Its central concern is tracking and dealing with the human coordination problems arising from the relations of things called states. How they balance, negotiate, exchange, and control material resources is of interest in so far as it threatens life of ‘states’, and, by extension, life of humans within these states. The international lives in a Newtonian universe of things, backgrounds, and for some even laws of interaction. And it is embedded in a deep humanist frame: humans are what matter in the state, politics, and also in the international. The accelerating transition to the language of global forces, global transactions, global institutions has hastened the move away from the international. Individuals, companies, NGOs, and other groups relate to each other, interact with each other globally, thus determining patterns of distribution and inequality. But even here, we are still in a Newtonian universe: the actors are traced as acting against the background of the ‘environment’ and ‘resources’. As such both these concepts are delimited as ways of understanding relations that matter to subject matter(s) of IR. There is the possibility that more than international and global human relations on this planet matter for our vulnerabilities, our co-existence, our intra-actions. Arguably, we also exist in planetary relations which shoot through the human, the social, the international and the global. Paying attention to the planetary relations—of bacteria and human symbiosis, variously conceived, in negotiations underpinning global health policies; of relations in plant, animal, and human ecologies and technologies in attempts to restructure food production; of human, AI, drone relations in war-making—may just reveal to us both the limitations of the international and the global as ways of thinking politics and political imagination, but it also opens up ways of relating beyond the relations we think that matter in IR today. The fact that this notion has been taken up in recent IR scholarship, then, is intriguing; and almost as intriguing are the intense disagreements that planet politics has already instigated. Much less than a ‘movement’, still, the planet politics manifesto has prompted some intense arguments about how the planet should be brought back in, in what ways, and with what consequences for IR, politics, and democracy. In what follows I examine how we might relate to the debates on planet/ary politics from a relational cosmology perspective.
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Potential of ‘Planet/ary Politics’ For some decades, IR theory has been rife with critical theory, new materialism, and environmental strands of thought. But these are brought together, into an intentionally powerful mix in the planet politics manifesto extolling the ‘end of IR’ in the journal Millennium, in 2016. This co-authored ‘manifesto’ by Anthony Burke, Stefanie Fishel, Audra Mitchell, Simon Dalby, and Daniel Levine argues that IR is becoming meaningless in the context of the real conditions of our planet in that this field designed to address the world’s grand challenges is not in fact able to do so due to its own conceptual groundings. The problem, for them, is that: ‘Trying to write from within IR, we find ourselves prisoners in our own vocation. We are speechless, or even worse, cannot find words to represent the world and those within it’(Burke et al., 2016: 502). The conceptual problem at the heart of the field is that ‘the planet does not match and cannot be clearly seen by its institutional and disciplinary frameworks’ based on anarchy and states (Burke et al., 2016: 501). In response, Burke et al. suggested that we move towards a less state-centric, less human-centric, and more interdisciplinary horizon of thought and practice. They do so by highlighting the spectre of ecological collapse around us: ‘Global ecological collapse brings new urgency to the claim that ‘we are all in this together’—humans, animals, ecologies, biosphere’ (2016: 500). This is the context within which ‘planet politics’ is proposed as a new way of thinking ahead. This planet politics . . . must emerge as an alternative thought and process: a politics to nurture worlds for all humans and species co-living in the biosphere. The local, national, and global no longer define our only spaces of action. The planet has long been that space which bears the scars of human will: in transforming the world into our world, we damaged and transformed it to suit our purposes. It now demands a new kind of responsibility, binding environmental justice and social justice inextricably together. (Burke et al., 2016: 500)
Burke et al. argue that a new consciousness is arising from ‘critical geography, posthuman IR, global governance and ecological politics’ (Burke et al., 2016: 501) and should be built into the core of how we think the subject. A key notion which motivates their call is the notion of Anthropocene: it ‘represents a new kind of power—‘social nature’—that is now turning on us. This power challenges our categories and methodologies’ (Burke et al., 2016: 502). In looking for a way out of IR, Burke et al. (2016: 504) ask: ‘[c]an we match the planet with our politics?’ What kind of species are we and what kind of politics matches that species? Their response is that: ‘[o]ur existence is neither international nor global, but planetary’ (Burke et al., 2016: 504). We must then
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do, not just international and global politics, but also planet politics. This planet politics: . . . must be simultaneously a practice of governance and of subversion, of regulation and resistance, at multiple scales and locales . . . Planet Politics must be very different from the elitist and state-centric global governance that is today’s handmaiden of extinction. (Burke et al., 2016: 507)
If the Anthropocene has forced a shift to ‘social nature’ where ‘human activity and nature are so bound together that they are existentially indistinguishable (Burke et al., 2016: 510), then we need to pay more attention to the power relations between us and other species. ‘Planet Politics will mean being worldly in a new way, a way that is entangled and plural with more than just homo sapiens’ (Burke et al., 2016: 513). In the manifesto, philosophical statements of such nature are mixed with specific policy and institutional reform suggestions. The authors for example call for coal to be recognized as a ‘controlled substance’. Call for rights for nonhumans and the criminalization of killing non-human beings are made alongside calls for a new UN system. Perhaps more radically, the manifesto writers call for a kind of a mind-shift: ‘Confronting the enormity of a possible mass extinction event requires a total overhaul of human perceptions of what is at stake in the disruption of the conditions of Earthly life’ (Burke et al., 2016: 517). We are entangled, and this means ‘that the response must be beyond the human’ (Burke et al., 2016: 521). As the reader can probably see, there is much here for us to be sympathetic to. The notions of relationality and planetary politics developed here work on the same lines in calling for a wider understanding of actors, in pushing beyond narrow humanist boundaries, in creating new possibilities of ‘entanglement’. An IR that sees beyond the human, the social, to the ‘social nature’ and our varied relational ‘processings with’ is certainly welcome. Yet, the planet politics agenda is also contested: and many issues are also raised by it which cause us to pause with concern. Some of these issues are highlighted well by the feisty critique of planet politics by Chandler, Cudworth, and Hobden (2017). These angry ‘fellow travellers’ (Chandler et al., 2017: 1) argue that ‘rather than breaking from the discipline, the Manifesto provides a problematic global governance agenda which is dangerously authoritarian and deeply depoliticising.’ They find embedded in Burke et al. ‘traditional concerns and perspectives of the discipline, especially those rehearsed in the 1990s by the liberal internationalist theorists of cosmopolitan democracy’ (Chandler et al. 2017: 2). While seeking to challenge the state-centrism of realism, the critics see a liberal institutionalist ‘global governance’ agenda at the heart of the approach, and thus argue that simply ‘exchanging the word “global” for the word “planetary” is not enough in itself to
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constitute a conceptual difference between the two approaches’ (Chandler et al., 2017: 2). Liberalism of Burke et al. is, they argue, displayed in: ‘seeking amelioration rather than transformation’ of the global system; ‘advocating top-down coercive approaches of international law as an effective mechanism’; and ‘resorting to abstract, high-flown and idealist notions, such as “global ethics” ’ (Chandler et al., 2017: 3). Chandler et al. also argue that capitalism and inequality, including how they are embedded in current global governance, are not part of the concerns of Burke et al., and they suspect that the posthumanism called for in the manifesto reduces in fact to a form of humanism and as such a ‘unified’ such. Indeed, the inequalities of humanhood and the multiplicity of being human is not discussed enough in the manifesto. Little reflection on the built-in inequalities of current institutional arrangements is undertaken (Chandler et al., 2017: 7) and there is little interrogation of the crucial concepts ‘planet’ or ‘humanity’. ‘Burke et al. are not the first commentators to problematically . . . suggest that “humanity” is a force of nature that is singular’ (Chandler et al., 2017: 9). This is not all. Burke et al.’s use of the notion of the Anthropocene, critics argue, calls forth a strange tyrannical politics. When ‘the planet tells us things’ the nonhuman becomes a site for advancement of elitist politics. In their vision of cosmopolitan posthumanism, democracy and bottom-up views disappear from the picture and abstract notions, such as global ethics become the veneers for ‘a new global liberal mission’ (Chandler et al., 2017: 5). Thus, there is a suspension of politics at play here under the guise of planet politics. For Chandler et al., this is: ‘an elitist and managerialist assault on the political imagination . . . when you scratch the surface, what is revealed is actually an anti-political manifesto: a call for the abolition of politics’ (Chandler et al., 2017: 12). This kind of a critique is significant, even as it is somewhat overcooked by the terms of the authors of the original manifesto (see their rejoinder, Fishel et al. 2017). It is significant not least because there are arguably ‘apolitical’ tonalities in the planet politics manifesto, and in other similar accounts, such as Hannes Peltonen’s (2017) account of planet politics,¹ but also because it demonstrates the disagreement and contestation which hides behind the ‘manifesto’ writing inclinations of the authors.
¹ Peltonen’s account visibly veers towards rather more conventional IR ground. His interest is in how climate change might be approached from planet politics and engages in ways of thinking about ‘reversal’ and ‘halted climate change’. While acknowledging the challenge to the human and the nonhuman that the Anthropocene raises, there is a kind of celebration of the control by humanity over the planet on show here. The planet is almost a threat, which is to be controlled; hence his emphasis on planet politics in allowing us to develop ‘the ability to govern the planet’ (my translation, Peltonen, 2017: 1). Planet politics in Peltonen’s account results in exploration of new forms of cooperation between states and individuals within the current political and economic order—a rather uninspiring, and for Chandler et al. surely an unambitious vision. Here too we find ‘the planet’: a singular ‘thing-like’ object that is to be ‘saved’, controlled, governed.
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What kind of ontology/ies underpin(s) planet politics? What is political about planet politics? How do we imagine the ‘planetary’ and relate it to the international/ global? How do we balance reform and transformation? How do we deal with democracy post-human? How do we engage other cosmologies? all these questions are raised, rather than resolved in this debate. Also, as Conway (2019) has noted, the hostile language within which these critical friends engage each other is anti-thetical to the kind of cross-human/cross-species kin-making they may wish to see enacted in planetary politics. Here, I wish to engage the planet politics debate from the relational cosmology orientation explored in above chapters.
Potential of Planetary Politics Despite the disagreements over the meaning and significance of planet politics, it does in my view open up interesting new avenues. First, it may connect IR to the (pluriversal) relational world. It always was the case that negotiating with not only humans but non-human others was central to our existence, our vulnerabilities and our co-living and conflict. Yet, IR has come to ‘write this out’ of its central concerns (Corry, 2017). Planetary politics is one trope through which the world can be written back into IR and IR connected back into the relational processing which underpins it. Thus we also gain a heightened sense of the many negotiations we must open up to, understand, relate to; including our own increasing ‘undoing’ as a unified actor. Power relations are many within and beyond humanity and its various matterings, and we need to understand these, and our own roles in them. In so doing we may become interested in the world in a different way. We may become concerned about uranium, the processing of this element in social and natural relations to render us tied in particular ‘global’ ways (Burke, 2017); or we may revisit the body politik to introduce new actors, as Fishel’s Microbial State does (2017). Or it may cause us to become interested in processing of carbon, and water, and weather, and how they structure past, current, and future social and political relations, and not only ‘causally’ as a material backdrop but in complex feedback loops with current policies, and political and ecosystem responses. Or it may make us interested in the human-technology interface, the making of the ‘human’ through social media technologies and the ‘soldier’ through AI interfaces. Or focus on the planetary may in part explain why we should be interested in the various critters on which war-making has in the past depended and continues to depend on; or it may cause us to revisit our theorizations of capitalism (Cudworth and Hobden, 2017). And it may cause us to pay attention to the cosmologies of the Andes where the human and non-human intermingle with more ease (Querejazu, 2016) or Daoist philosophy in which
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relationality is inescapable (Ling, 2013). And, as I argue below, it may cause us to rethink when and how democracy works and how it might be reformed. When we are interested in such ways we do not stand aloof from the world and see our politics as standing apart from planetary relations which make us and continue to make us. We have been pushed to undo ‘us’, soften us around the edges, and as such not to glorify our politics, our states, our divinities as ways of relating to the world. We see our survival as collaborative, as Tsing (2015) emphasizes: no one here survives on their own. We are sceptical of the manoeuvres which lift human citizens to do politics, states to do international politics and human networks to do global politics; we are in the world, of it, not simply on it, managing it, regulating it. The potential, then, in ‘getting us interested’ in the world around IR—in new ways not so easily lapsable back to the categories of humanist IR—is there. This may help us with the ‘Anthropocene’ (Harrington, 2016; Dalby, 2014), the challenge of thinking humans with the non-humans in a complex world of codependence and relationality. And it may help us think away from colonial and Western hegemonies of thought and political practice and point the way to a more global or pluriversal IR (Acharya, 2016; Blaney and Tickner, 2017). If we are not on top of the world, controlling it and its things; if we are porous, made of the relationalities, politics too is of a different kind (explored below). Yet there are always, as with any approximation developed out of social and political circumstances, aspects to be wary of, critical of, and mindful of.
Politics in Planet Politics Whatever the limitations of Chandler et al.’s critique of Burke et al. (and I think it is fair to claim that they ‘over-read’ the original piece in terms of e.g. its ‘interventionist’ or ‘tyrannical’ impetuses), in terms of politics of the planet politics, Chandler et al. are right to point out the curious stepping aside from ‘politics’, that is intense contestation, around the planet, and planet politics. While Burke et al.’s document may be a manifesto for a new kind of engagement with the world, it is not a call for ‘political contestation’ and disagreement around ‘planet politics’. They recognize the role of resistance and disagreement in their rejoinder (Fishel et al., 2017) but did not develop the lines of potential contention or politics around their propositions, calling instead for solutions, new mindsets, and cosmovisions. This is a limitation, for we can expect that on a planet shared by situated agents and beings, understandings of the planet and planetarity differ and are consequential. Indeed, as Conway (2019) puts it, via Spivak’s engagement with planetarity, it is the conditions of envisioning planetarity that are also at stake in
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planetary imaginations. This entails a political disagreement, contestation, over the planetary and how it is imagined. Indeed, it is important to remember that planetarity can be harnessed for cosmologies that are far from relational. Burke’s security cosmopolitanism for example comes from a less-than-fully-relational reading of the cosmos by the standards of relationality set here (as observed in the previous chapters). A relational orientation to planetarity would here not simply set out a unified vision but would also keep alive a relational relatings which encourage engagement with planetarity and would also go beyond the planetary and reflect on the limits of the planetary. A relational planetary politics should be open to disagreement and stretching: because it is not lifted off the planet looking down on it but developed situatedly from relations. From a relational perspective we are not directed to find agreement, peace, and harmony in planetary politics: a cosmic perspective does not entail holding hands to save the planet. We have different views of the relations we are in, for we are in them unevenly and we ‘relate’ to them differently. Relational topographies are varied, meanings in them varied, and ‘worlds’ (in a pluriverse theorist sense) emerging from them variously related. Politics here then must remain contested and situated and relational; we cannot ‘jump outside’ of our situatedness to the ‘cosmotrope’ of universality, cosmopolitan commitments, and institutional resolutions. Aspiring to cosmic harmony and taking on responsibility for the planet are much more easy and pleasing tasks for a modern human used to the promises of redemption than those dealing with cosmic relationalities, difficult, strange, uneven, and contested. It is not an easy task to know what the cosmos is telling us or how we should relate to the planet from the cosmos. As we have seen, we cannot jump outside of the cosmos to get a God’s eye view. More careful cosmovisioning—planetary or beyond—is both possible and desirable, and such cosmo-visioning has everything to do with political stakes.²
Limits We should also note that there are many limits to the planetary dialogue from our perspective. This of course is on some level inevitable: from a relational perspective all concepts, including the planetary, are negotiated approximations at how to come to the world and never ‘the truth’.
² It is absolutely the case that the singular cosmovision of Western science is a danger, but so is uncritical acceptance of indigenous cosmologies. These should not be exempt from scrutiny, scientifically (and this does not mean singular standards of Western science) or politically.
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This sense of limitation may be worth more emphasis in the debates to come. Whether Haraway, Connolly, Latour, or Burke et al., there is a tendency in the planetary politics debates to start a new paradigm; a new school. There is also as such a tendency to celebrate the earthly, the terran, the planetary. Such delimitations come with consequences for how we relate to our relations and stretch in the mesh. Here I would like to then call on critical reflection on the limits of the planetary. It should not entail a paradigm we ‘move to’ but a conceptual approximation from which we can think anew. And we should think on its blind spots and effects. We should consider, what kind cosmology do we imagine through it and what conditions make imagining planetary politics in particular ways possible? What are the effects of planetarity and what does it do to our political engagements? And are there other conceptual tropes that help us stretch into the world? All concepts are limited (by the terms expressed in chapter 4) and this includes the planetary. If the international and the global come with baggage, it is not likely the planetary comes with no attachments, limits, of its own. We must then develop the politics and conceptual universes emergent from the use of this notion with caution, wariness and a willingness to stretch, both the conceptual universes in which we develop the notion and beyond the notion. Planetarity may need a manifesto, but it is not a programme, a party, an ideology. It is a conceptual trope around which we may be able to do politics, differently.
Democracy Perhaps most concerning for us is the debate around democracy. Burke et al. are criticized for not thinking carefully about democracy in the Anthropocene (Chandler et al., 2017). But Chandler et al. do not say much more, beyond their call to ‘make kin’. But how do we do democracy, or politics, today, and in a relational cosmos? Or should we give up on democracy? This is a serious question, for democracy is tied up with questions of how we relate, who matters, and what kinds of dialogues are possible. This is then something for planetary politics perspectives to try to develop. So doing might not only give us a clearer sense of what democracy and politics might mean in the ‘relational’ planetary systems (rather than a God’s eye planetarity or cosmology), it might also help in part to develop the planetary as more than ‘disciplinary polemics’ to encompass actual practices of relating and re-relating. In what follows I sketch out some initial openings in this regard.
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The Future of Democratic Politics in Planetary Relations and Beyond What would a truly democratic encounter between truly equal beings look like, what would it be—can we even imagine that? (Morton, 2010: 7) If ‘planetary’ is the conceptual trope we could move to, what are we to make of the ‘politics’ within the planetary? Can democracy—a relatively recently revered, a contested, and for some today ‘receding’ concept—serve, from a relational cosmology perspective, as a way of rethinking ‘politics’ and how we relate to its subjects, its processes, its delimitations? Classically, of course politics, including experiments at democratic politics, have taken place in the realm of the polis, the state, or alternatively within the international (between states) or globally, as global governance. But is the limit of politics the ‘state’, the ‘international’, or ‘global governance’? What might it mean to do politics in planetary relations? Is there a politics beyond the state and a politics beyond the international and the global? And what kind of politics might take place in planetary relations freed from the impediments of classical images of the political, the international, and the global? In the below I develop a set of arguments around ‘planetary democracy’. I argue, drawing on both relational cosmology and critical humanism, for a vision of democracy as tied up with ‘relating to relations’. In this vision, democracy: a) is not a thing, a product, a commodity, a procedure, a value, but: b) democracy is defined by and in relations ‘relating’; c) is intra-acted into being and is negotiated in processes between multiple porous relationally constituted ‘represented’ and ‘representations’; d) encompasses the human and the non-human, and the arts and the sciences. Each of these assumptions takes on a set of issues in existing practices of thinking, doing, and promoting democracy, perhaps most notably the deep humanism of existing democratic imaginations.
The Rise of Democracy Democracy, in its various formulations, is a rather popular notion even as it was historically an unpopular governance system (see Hobson, 2016; McPherson, 1977). It has spread, as a contested word, practice, and ideology around the world in the last two hundred years. Since the emergence of various democratic
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regimes and the expansion of suffrage rights across populations, democracy has also become something of a force internationally as some states, notably the United States, have associated the expansion democratic governance internationally³ with their foreign policy interests (Smith, 2012 [2000]). In a world full of monarchies, the republic from its early days conceived the expansion of the realm of republican democratic governance to be in its interest. This form of government, conceived in ‘liberal’ terms, also allowed for free exchange of goods and business across state borders and thus benefited the enterprising nation in the new world (see e.g. Robinson, 1996). A long and spotty history of ‘promoting’ democracy followed, with notable successes, for example, in Japan and Germany and notable failures in Iraq (Bridoux, 2011). In the context of the rise of democracy, political scientists and IR theorists have tried to make sense of democracy, asking what makes it function, how best to structure it and, indeed, how it can be promoted across the nations of the globe. Various reasons have been cited to account for occasions where democracy fails: from lack of institutionalization of democracy and lack of appropriate civil society values to lack of social or political will, internally or externally, or difficult politicoeconomic conditions (see e.g. Linz and Stepan, 1996; Whitehead, 2002; Diamond, 1999; Keane, 2009; Carothers, 1999; Barany and Moser, 2009). Others, including myself, have pointed to the ideological and political contestation around democracy, what it means and how it should be constituted (Abrahamsen, 2000; Kurki, 2010; Kurki, 2013). While many disagreements characterize debates on democracy—what makes it tick and how it should be constituted and promoted—what is intriguing about the discussion surrounding democracy, democratization, and democracy promotion is the one shared assumption—even amongst those (including myself ) who have highlighted its contested nature: democracy relates to governance of a distinct, human realm. Democracy is about governing human interaction problems. Indeed, in IR literature and in political practice, in everyday parlance and in foreign policy circles, democracy is a quintessentially ‘human’ or ‘social’ phenomenon: it is a solution, socially, politically, institutionally, to problems of human coordination, specifically the problem of ‘governance’ of, by, and for human beings. This is true of democracy at the level of the ‘domestic’ polis and at the level of the international and global attempts to develop democratic governance. Human coordination problems surely include governance of life and matter outside human relationships. But while democratic governance tries to address the ‘environment’ and how it is managed, democracy does not extend to the relationalities; or, put differently, the relationalities, the strange strangers of the mesh, do not ‘shoot through’ democracy as it is currently imagined. But
³ That is, state democratization in the international system.
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democracy today must also think on how humans can coordinate with ‘the environment’. This is all the more important in the age of the Anthropocene (Eckersley, 2017). If developing the planetary politics is our aim, if escaping the state, the international, and the human global sphere is our aim, then how do we think democracy? If democracy’s current home in the ‘human social and political sphere’ presents us with challenges, one thing the relational and planetary perspective immediately reminds us of is that it is quite possible, even if we have ignored it, that processes of democracy and democratization, and attempts to contextualize them in socioeconomic and cultural relations, are already deeply enmeshed in relations. Ecologies underpin economies and cultural interactions, environments delimit the political. The causal interactions may be too complex for us to ‘model’ (as causal), but from this perspective it is quite plausible that democracies are already embedded in their functioning in the world beyond the human. Even if we imagine them so, they likely do not ‘hang above’ the ‘environment’ in some distinct ‘human’ or ‘social’ sphere. The conceptual trick that has delimited democracy thus has made it seem that democracies are ‘human spheres’ of coordination, but it has taken a set of very specific assumptions to imagine our relationalities in this way. If we ‘re-relate’ to the relationalities in the mesh we may see how our democracies have represented the non-human in very specific ways: as ‘nature’ to be protected, as ‘environment’ to be managed. But when we re-relate, we may also re-think how we represent. And we may rethink our own role, vis-à-vis others, in democratic politics.
Demos and Polis As we have seen, classically, democracy is about humans and democratic thought and practice has struggled to take account of the non-human world. Yet, some important openings in such debates already exist. Classical attempts to take account of the non-human in ethics and democratic theory include the classical political theory attempts to represent the rights of the non-human animals, such as Singer’s (1975). In a book which played a key role in grounding the animal liberation movement, Singer defended a utilitarian principle of good of the greatest number in relation to animals. While many global democracy advocates only secondarily took account of the environment in their representations of the challenges of cosmopolitan politics (see e.g. Archibugi, Held, and Kohler, 1998; Archibugi, 2008), others have sought to build an environmental awareness into their cosmopolitan models (Burke, 2013b), seeking to ensure global regulation of economic as well as political life in defence of the environment. Others have argued for sustainable or ecological citizenship as a new way
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forward (Dobson, 2007) in reframing our expectations of ourselves and our political communities. Perhaps the most important work in thinking through democracy and environment has been Robyn Eckersley’s work. She was not only the original developer of the idea of ‘green state’ in IR context (2004), exploring the implications of the environment for states and the international, but recently she has also explicitly become intrigued by the implications for democracy of the Anthropocene. In her 2017 article she develops an interesting idea of a ‘geopolitan democracy’ in the Antropocene, ‘an account of hyper-reflexive “geopolitan democracy” based on a . . . radical extension of democratic horizons of space, time, community and agency as the appropriate response to navigating the Anthropocene’ (Eckersley, 2017: 983). The Anthropocene, for her, raises important questions about humans’ role: should humans be in the driving seat? Who should do the driving and how is this to be done? What kind of geological agency should emerge from the Anthropocene and what are the implications for democracy? Tracing different kinds of ecological discourses, Eckersley identifies problems of disenfranchisement in various quarters of eco-politics. She seeks to ‘expos[e] the complicity of liberal democracy in undermining Earth systems processes while also providing a basis for cultivating a more reflexive democratic political culture in liberal democracies in ways that are much more attentive to links with other socioecological communities and larger Earth systems processes’ (Eckersley, 2017: 984–5). The aim is not so much to create another model of democracy as it is to undermine the ‘geostory’ of humanity in order to imagine possible ways of acting, being democratically. Our earthling-ness connects us to the planet and exposes for us our fragility. She argues for a ‘more outward looking hyper-reflexivity’ (Eckerlsey, 2017: 994) which allows us to reflect on the conditions of human and non-human interdependence and thus allows us to also challenge the uncritical human dominance in much ethical and political debate. She explicitly recognizes that the centrality of the human to democratic politics should not go unrecognized and that traditional accounts of community or citizenship cannot be extended. Extension of trust between scientists and lay people, changes in academic practice, interdisciplinary explorations of art with science and science with art are called for in a down-to-earth politics of the bottom-up, which international-level negotiations can complement. This is an interesting opening and worthy of serious consideration both in IR and debates on democratic theory and democratic practice. By relational cosmology’s orientations as developed here, it is nevertheless a relatively modest extension of how we could think and practise democracy. It does not for example challenge the structures of the international or global or the centrality of humans for democracy.
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Latour’s development of democracy is arguably more ambitious in challenging how we think demos and polis. Latour’s concern is with the nature–culture division not only in the individual sciences but also in how the sciences interact with politics. The separations of the subjects make difficult understanding how things overlap, or are hybrid (Latour, 1993). With the birth of the modern man, and politics, is also born ‘nature’ and the ‘non-human’. What should a Constitution, not for humans, or for nature, but for hybrids look like, he asks (Latour, 1993: 14). If science doesn’t pertain to inert things, and politics to humans, how do we think? It is the division, separation of politics from science, which makes the hybrid life (that we actually live) become unthinkable, impossible. But if we undo this division and open to the hybridity we have available to us, ways of being, relating, doing appear to us differently. This is what he captures with the notion of the Parliament of Things. Here representations are not only of scientists of nature and humans of politics but of various contributors on various ‘quasi-objects’ we have constructed, in different ways, in our division of the world. In the Parliament of Things ‘the continuity of the collective is reconfigured’ (1993: 144). Here, then: Natures are present, but with their representatives, scientists who speak in their name. Societies are present, but with the objects that have been serving as their ballast from time immemorial. Let one of the representatives talk, for instance, about the ozone hole, another represent the Monsanto chemical industry, a third the workers of the same chemical industry, another the voters of New Hampshire, a fifth the meteorology of the polar regions, let still another speak in the name of the State; what does it matter, so long as they are all talking about the same thing, about a quasi-object they have all created, the object-discoursenature-society whose new properties astound us all and whose network extends from my refrigerator to the Antarctic by way of chemistry, law, the State, the economy, and satellites. (Latour, 1993: 144)
In the Parliament of Things, we come to rethink politics and its reach, and also ‘nature’ as an object. The lines of division become impossible and political tasks, including science, different. And the possibilities for reconsidering what kinds of communities can be ‘composed’ becomes rather different from notions of politics where the community, the polis, and its borders have been predefined to any political interaction. Universalism is to be composed. The universality of human race in nature doesn’t work. Something else has to be done before we talk about the common world again . . . . Politics is a progressive composition of the common world. (Latour, quoted in Salter and Walters, 2016: 21)
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As Latour’s followers in practical development of the Parliament of Things explicitly state: We share this world with many. Law should not be centred around Men, but around Life. We are just one party, among all animals, plants and objects. What if we welcome all things into our Parliament? What would be the plight of the planet? The reasoning of a fish? What claims would trees make, and what future would oil see for itself? (Parliament of Things, 2018)
For Latour, this kind of politics necessitates a kind of representing of the nonhuman in political dialogue. He argues that we already represent Nature in all of our politics already, just not very carefully. A more careful, concerned, responseable kind of representing of interests of nature, via human imagination and engagement, would result in negotiations which build non-human interests in human deliberations. Not only has this been human practice prior to agricultural societies and the separation of human and animal (see e.g. Harari, 2016), and not only does it continue in other parts of the world where animal–human interactions are differently configured (Kohn, 2013) but also it is, he argues, eminently possible in current political practice (Latour, 2017). If we do not lock our minds, hearts, and representations into the House of Humans and their politics (and those of non-humans into the House of Nature) we can come to see that we and others ‘do represent’ and that we too can represent in relations with each other differently (Latour, 2004b). It is our political task to ‘compose’ communities in relations as we re-relate to them. This view is of relevance for our perspective in a number of ways. Indeed, it provides a much closer fit, I think, with the relational cosmology extension of thinking beyond democracy as we know it. First, there is a curious synergy, it seems, between Latour’s notions of extending the community of beings and Smolin’s democratic practice in the universe. Arguably, the two perspectives, while they arise from different origins, share an interest in dynamically relating, re-relating, and thus politically engaging the world and its relations (even as Latour prefers, ironically, the language of ‘things’). It is also noteworthy that in both perspectives the role of science in composing political community and democracy comes to the fore. For Smolin (2008) science is about an open process of probing into the world, and is close in its association with a democratic ethos. And for Latour (somewhat more ‘critically’), science is a way of relating scientists and the world, of composing the relations in the world in new ways. It follows that both also see the importance of politics for science and science for politics. Science, politics, and democracy are not matters of separate houses; they are tied up with each other. Science (re)presents, intra-acts, composes communities, it is also ethical, political, potentially democratic in bringing new
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things to bear on our relations. And politics is not merely the politics of institutions between humans, it is about extending our being with many different kinds of others—a process to be undertaken through art, through science, or through everyday responsiveness. So when we seek to develop democracy for the relational universe, it is politics, science, and democracy along these lines that we can be thinking, developing, practising. But what does the relational cosmology perspective specifically bring to this process of recomposing democratic politics and representation? I think it brings emphasis on three distinct aspects. First, while sympathetic to Eckersley’s project, we are somewhat more critical of the international and the global as ways of developing geopolitan democracy. The international is not an innocent partaker in democracy and blinds us to the possibilities of being. We are then somewhat more radical in stretching beyond the current practices of democracy. Second, we are called not only to compose, to relate, but also to ‘re-relate’, to ‘stretch’ and to ‘queer’ in re-relating. The emphasis here then is not so much on composing ‘flat’ assemblages, as for Latour, but also on re-relating, thinking anew. In so doing we try not to just ‘find things’, to ‘feel them’, but also to locate their porosities, relationalities, smearing. In so doing we need to engage abstraction. Pushing beyond Latour’s flat ontology allows us also to be critical of the critique of criticality which Latour puts forward. As Mallavaparu and Prasad too have shown (2006) there are limitations in Latour’s ‘flat ontology’ when it comes to critical reflection on the situated role of the analyst and in his lack of interest in power relations and hierarchies. Our stretching insists not only on composition but also stretching and challenging our compositions. Active reflection on the ‘power differentials between the spokespersons or problems in recovering voices . . . of actants because of asymmetries of power’ (Mallavarapu and Prasat, 2006: 193) should also form part of this new democratic politics. Indeed, I would like to propose that vision is important in imagining how to conduct critical humanist democratic planetary politics, but also that this is premised upon acceptance of relationality, the uncertainty and incompleteness of our knowledge of (unbounded) selves and others, and the need to stretch, to reach beyond, to think beyond, to understand beyond the relations which appear apparent to us. Here conceptual thinking can help, for the flat relations do not emerge to us unconceptually; abstraction can be a threat, but in the mesh of strange strangers it is also indispensable. Third, with Smolin’s relational thinking challenge hanging over us, we also challenge here the language of things in Latour’s composition. Indeed, the language of things may provide a limit to the potential of Latour’s perspective and that of others who develop radical democratic politics from things, such as Levi Bryant (2014). We can relate in different, more porous, ways than through
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‘things’. Perhaps then what we should compose is not just a Parliament of Things but a Politics of the Related, or Parliament of Kin. A view of planetary democratic politics beyond things and beyond the human as developed here may sound unpractical or utopian, but such dismissal is difficult for two reasons. First, such processes of ‘making kin’ (Haraway, 2016), that is, re-relating to politics beyond the human, are already afoot, not just in environmental political circles, but far beyond them, in interactions of humans and technologies (explored, for example, in Grove, 2019, see also Coker, 2018), in political projects drawing together humans and non-humans (Parliament of Things, 2018), and in everyday lives of those who relate, and re-relate, to their responsibilities and commitments anew through art, through science, through new kinly commitments. Relating to relations via relational cosmology includes my own practices of democratic politics: I represent myself to relations differently, and I represent others to politics differently, not only in everyday encounters but also in this book (for other examples of such alternative politics see e.g. Haraway 2016). Second, utopia is not what I have in mind for a new politics, for utopia weighs far too heavy on us with its metaphysical reference points. We are here after not ideal politics but politics of relating. This is a critical politics of negotiating who matters and how, and how their interests, beings, relatings are related. As Latour (2016: 2) puts it: how can we feel we have an identity if it depends on what is outside and how can we act selfishly if our own ‘borders’ are confused or ‘smeared’ across relations ? If we are overlapping, what does this mean, for attempts to build ‘autonomy’? I agree with Latour that at a minimum we should strive for ‘a new body politic precisely because the conceptions of bodies, of natures and of politics are everywhere transformed’ (Latour, 2016: 13). To give an example of how we might re-relate and what that might mean, somewhat more concretely, let us examine an example from current international politics. Let us examine something of a high-political, contested, if also somewhat mundane, area of Brexit negotiations: renegotiation of fisheries policies.
Practising Re-relating: Brexit Fisheries Policy The EU and the UK, alongside other stakeholders, are currently (at the time of writing) keen to negotiate fish quotas for the post-Brexit era. Many actors are keenly interested in these negotiations: the British state, the EU officials, fisheries management bodies, companies catching and selling fish, fishermen, their communities, and scientists studying fish and related ecosystems. But from a planetary perspective, the fish are not ‘stocks’, merely ‘a resource to be exploited’ (Barkin, 2018: 143); they are in a relational dance in ecosystems, with
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the fisheries industry, with the state system, and with climate patterns. Crucially, they are not a background to ‘us humans’ being able to maintain our livelihoods; nor a stable background to states’ tussles around power and interests. It may be that ‘international negotiations’ create an international order in which the fish are placed in particular relations of representation with ‘us humans’ and ‘our states’, and as such they are imperfectly represented in relational dance with us (see e.g. Barkin, 2018 on ‘mismatches’ between marine ecology and ‘international’ governance of it). Yet, fish are relationally constituted by and relationally constituting of us and the international and they have interests in how this relationality is conceived and represented. We can and do relate to the fish, daily, but how we do so is not a straightforward matter because our conditions of production of ourselves are tied up with how we produce them, intra-act them, relate to them via the international. Reflecting the human-centricity of the notions of community embedded in the international order, in the world of the ‘international’ the norm has been to impose linear, human-centred ‘regimes’ on fish; regimes which negotiate human communities’ political interests but give scant concern to the multiple misunderstandings or misrepresentations of temporal and spatial concerns of fish in these regimes. As Samuel Barkin (2018) argues, the existing governance regimes tend to encourage human communities to overfish and fish ecologies to collapse. In this context, we may not come to Brexit fisheries negotiations with great hopes. And what we find is a desperately human-only site of negotiations. Listen, for example, to Elisabeth Truss (2016, my italics) explaining why the UK should stay in EU fisheries policy: I firmly believe UK fishermen are better off inside the EU. Our EU membership brings many important benefits: easy access to the world’s largest single market of 500 million consumers, the right to fish in the waters of other member states, and the collective bargaining power to negotiate access rights with the wider world—as well as the power to influence fishing policy across the continent.
There may not be much striking about this statement until one starts to notice how she focuses solely on representing human interests vis-à-vis human interests, in a world of states acting as intermediaries of human interest representation. Fish have no interests, nor rights to be represented. Certainly, there is interest in sustainability of stocks; but solely from the point of view of human communities. Fishing policy is a domain where fish get a look-in in no other terms but under a ‘right to be accessed’ by states. Strikingly, even the ‘wider world’ here refers exclusively to the human domain. There is no ‘fish world’. There is no world beyond the human interests—via fishermen and consumers—and the world of states which ‘own’ and control (the totality of) the ‘world’. As states seek their ‘access rights’ the fish are silenced, and
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their lifeways forced into a one-sided relational dance with our lifeways. As the international negotiations, treaties, and institutions unfold, the concerns of the fish emerge only insofar as state populations are affected. Would it be possible to have a voice, a view, an interest, expressed in defence of the fish communities, or fish–dolphin communities, or human–fish communities? Once one starts to ‘expect’ to hear such a voice because it is ontologically expected by our relational ontology and politically made ‘possible’ to imagine by our critical humanist ethics, the lack of such voices in ‘international politics’ becomes surprising; no, it becomes outrageous! In fact, here we can concretely see that the international political discussion is ‘the site’ where such interests can precisely be ‘washed off’ our human horizons, our consciousnesses: once the state and its interest in human interests is wedded into the ‘international’ structure of human domination, no fish can be heard. Even if fish and other species might make themselves heard through ‘art’, through ‘science’ (marine ecology), or even through ‘domestic politics’, representation via environmental organizations, the international is like the final firewall that eradicates their views, removes them from our concerns. In the international, the environment truly is the ‘background’, to the grave politics of coordination of the humans. The international, like science, is not innocent. It weighs on us, and the fish and marine communities. Like in any political relationship, there is power in the relationships imagined through the international: it sets out not only power political conditions within the states and in the international order but also, simultaneously, between humans and non-humans. Just as meaningful representation of women or slaves was once made impossible by how they were represented in the polis (by white men who benefited from their subservience), the interests of non-human others struggle for representation by the humans who only ‘see’ themselves in their polis. How, then, could a different kind of a democratic representation be envisioned? In practising planetary democracy, options are many, for we are not tied to the polis of the state, or liberal democracy, or global governance through institutions. One option is for human actors to do such representing. In the case of fisheries policy the best ‘human’ friends the fish have had have been various green NGOs seeking to raise their voice in their defence. Yet, the state actors, the international regimes, and the global entrepreneurial actors provide us little hope: they are the representatives of the lifted human. They ‘created’ the governance structures and control the access to key debates, on fish, on climate, on the ‘environment’. This is why representation of others lacks serious attempts to relate, and our representative practices are biased towards the human. Yet NGO actors, indigenous groups, and other transnational actors can, on occasion, gain a voice at the table. They can represent, through human voice, at the human table, the voice of the fish, the wider ecosystem, the strange strangers; not ‘purely’, ‘perfectly’, of course, but
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‘better’, with more care, with more concern, more response-ably, because they relate to relations with fish. Another set of actors to do the representing can be the scientists. Indeed, science holds great promise as a way of thinking, doing, and promoting democracy. This is because in a relational frame, science is not Science, it is the sciences as Latour would have it. And in this frame science is not the enemy of the art of ‘worlding’ or ‘representing’. Rather, arguably, in this frame how we world science, and through it the world, is the big question of democratic politics, of relating today. Science is not beyond politics but part of it. Science is not empirical but philosophical, speculative, stretchy. Science is not a God’s eye view but stretchy situatedness in an uncertain and contingent process of relating. This kind of science entails not only the impossibility of positivism but the need for a new postpositivist, interdisciplinary, inter-science conversation and commitment to the world. Thus, the practices of a marine scientists, for example, in representing the fish, the ecosystem, and their interests are important in Brexit fisheries policies. Sharing the life experiences, the languages, the interests, and the stakes of the strange strangers is the scientists’ opportunity. Not to lose the opportunity to represent in this biased frame, it is important that the scientists do not pander to the humans too much, but also that they queer, mess up, and represent the ‘strange strangers’ in the face of the uphill battle. Science, when rescued from its capitalist and state owners who would like to continually master it, holds paradoxically significant hopes for democratic politics in the planetary age. As Smolin emphasizes, sciences are ethical communities around particular subjects; ‘activity by means of which we display the same respect for nature that we aspire to show each other in a democratic society’ (Smolin, 1997: 364). And, in our terms, it is also how we dissolve nature and the social and the political: how we think, act, and practise sciences matters not only for science but also for politics. This is significant not only to allow new practices of representation but also because the familiar notion that science is somehow separate from the social and cultural is one of the hegemonies that block vision of the multiple ways that science and its practices are intertwined [with political projects:] masculinist, racist . . . colonial histories . . . [and] feminist, just, anti-racist [too]. (Schneider, 2005: 29)
Yet, as non-scientists we can also engage in democratic politics ourselves, through mattering ourselves, and our relations with ethical responsibility to how we make the world. Ethical mattering, from my daily choices of cat food to teaching practices around IR matter as ‘cuts’ in the world. In our daily lives of humans and non-humans of course we are constantly challenged by trouble, dilemmas, torn commitments to ourselves, our human family, and ‘the others’. No easy
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solutions present themselves in the mesh. By being concerned about relations and attempting to re-relate to the mesh, we can, if not solve such dilemmas, develop responsibility for what we do—for the cows I encourage my cats to eat, for the spider my broom squashed, the tadpoles that died in the drought. And thus we can also become response-able in Haraway’s sense to them, not only to responding to the strange strangers in the mesh but also to the wider relationalities which mediate our relational encounters, political economy of intense animal agriculture, ideologies of humanism, and complex processes of climate change. It is not our duty, or our compassion, that dictates our political engagements; it is how we relate to our relations, situatedly, which brings on the dilemmas of being in the mesh. We will not have ‘peace and harmony’ in a world with gradients (we all need to metabolize) but we can still represent others; never perfectly, but better than we currently do, and with important consequences for what matters politically. The interests of the fish, for example have been represented in interesting new ways through the venture called the Embassy of the North Sea. This project seeks to represent interests differently, across levels and communities, and it asks the politicians to consider new questions, namely (Embassy of the North Sea, 2018): 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.
What is the North Sea? What is our relation with the North Sea? Which language does the North Sea speak? How can we look at the North Sea differently? What is the impact of climate change on the North Sea? What are the interests of the North Sea? How can we translate and present the interests of the North Sea (subjectively and objectively) in an Embassy of the North Sea?
This new politics may not rewrite Brexit, the power of the state, and the power of humans, but it does sow an interest in and active processes of negotiation of politics in ways we are not used to. Democracy beyond the human is possible, difficult, and interesting. We should remember this when we are drawn back to the state, to the international, to the global to solve our global or even planetary problems. This may be impossible to avoid in a world where the state, the international, and the global dominate not only our consciousness but also how we structure politics and indeed how we imagine the human and the non-human (our sphere of the cosmos). Even so, when engaging in international politics, or IR, at a minimum we should ask ourselves: 1) what cosmology makes this view possible and 2) what does this view do to politics and what matters. International politics and IR matter—we are indeed their children (Booth, 2017)—but they matter also in
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delimiting ways, for our cosmologies and our politics. New cosmologies and new political commitments can be imagined; are being imagined.
In Sum I expect an unsympathetic response to such a perspective from IR’s defenders of ‘real’ pragmatic politics. And I expect the advocates of democracy will not jump up in delight at the need to consider the non-human as part of the challenges of democratic representation when the rights of many humans are only just being achieved. After all, many of ‘us’ have been taught, thoroughly, that the human is human, the human is special. And we have been instructed by democracy’s advocates that democracy is the domain of the human, the social, and that these define the content of the political. States decide, via democracy, how we deal with the background, the environment, the animal, and the international, and the global, lock in this statist imagination of politics and democracy in a way which is difficult to unlock. State politics, international politics, global politics will ultimately save us, or at least they are the limit of how we can perceive we might save ourselves. But if we cannot ‘sit’ against a background and if the background in fact ‘does’ a lot more than we think, then can we ‘sit’ on top of the background with our ‘states’ and our all too human ‘democracy’? We can, and we do, but I would suggest here at a certain peril for ‘us’. We come to misapproximate how our own relations are structured, facilitated, and how they fail and succeed and for whom. It would be nice if we could ‘lift’ the human out of the world, the planet, but do we not already know that this is impossible? The relational revolution has been telling us this, in various ways, for decades now. Perhaps then in IR too it is time to loosen our concepts and re-engage the world, by paying attention to relations beyond states and beyond the humans, by engaging bacteria, animals, plants, and geophysical processes as not only actors but as relations that matter for how we matter international relations. International and global relations, for sure, ‘matter’ for how human life unfolds, but they also delimit how we relate to relations we, and our international and global relations, are of. Relational cosmology as translated here suggests that we should fight this urge to aspire to imagine others or ourselves as Gods and, instead, should grapple with the uncomfortable but in its own way liberating perspective that we now have of the universe and ourselves so as to ground ourselves but also stretch ourselves anew in a universe of relations. In such a process we may be doing more than ‘knowing’ or ‘becoming’; we may indeed be forging a community of a new kind. As Smolin emphasizes, how we think and practise ‘community’ is ultimately very much a cosmological question. From cosmological re-imagining
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emerges, perhaps, not only new science, new concepts, but also a new kind of politics and a new kind of political imagination.
Conclusion To be part of the relational processes of the universe is to be open, to be related, to be grounded, and to be curious of the changing, mutable, many-scaled, varied, situated relationalities we are in and of. Whether we are earthlings (Latour), terran (Cudworth and Hobden), compostist (Haraway), or parasites (Serres), we are no longer only Citizens, Scientists, or God’s children bonded by the ‘Social’ cues and ‘Moral’ rules but also in the world, related and re-relating—yes, to animals, vegetables, and minerals! In such a universe, many unthinkable thoughts become strangely thinkable. And once they have become thinkable, they become difficult to unthink, to put aside. Once we have related to the world in different ways those new relational intra-actions press on us, work on us, intra-act us in different ways, making new response-abilities possible. Conceptual frames are real and place us in real relations of relating. This is why re-thinking thoughts and re-relating to relations, matters, for us, for IR, and for our political commitments.
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Conclusion: Five Challenges for IR and ir Think we must; we must think! . . . It matters what thought thinks thoughts. It matters what knowledges know knowledges. It matters what relations relate relations. (Haraway, 2016: 36, 35) We belong to a short-lived genus of species. All of our cousins are already extinct. What’s more, we do damage . . . For the Earth [brutal climate and environmental changes which we trigger] may turn out to be a small irrelevant blib, but I do not think that we will outlast them unscathed . . . .I fear that soon we shall . . . become the only species that will knowingly watch the coming of its own collective demise, or at least the demise of its civilization. (Rovelli, 2014: 76) This book has explored the consequences of the proposition and the finding that we are ‘of ’ the cosmos for theorization of—or ‘translations’ into something else of—International Relations. This intervention comes in the context of increasing disaffection with international politics, International Relations, with the social sciences and even with the sciences, in facilitating avoidance of, as Rovelli puts it, a ‘collective demise’. The worry expressed across fields is that our sciences and our politics, confident as they stand, seem unable not only to productively tackle our condition, but also to grasp it. And as such they fail to imagine and re-imagine. This is particularly worrisome for IR for this has been the discipline that has exposed us to the problems of ‘co-existence’, vulnerability to others, the making of our fates ‘together’. IR matters then because it is a discipline which draws our attention to our exposure and making of in relation to others, what Rosenberg (2016) terms multiplicity. And yet how we think multiplicity, co-existence, vulnerability, and co-moving in IR matters, for IR as a discipline ‘has contributed to making the world we live now, for good or ill’ (Crawford, 2016: 267). In this book I argue that in order to think IR anew, more comprehensively, we need to think relations, and relations beyond states, beyond societies, beyond things. We need to reckon with the implicit cosmological commitments of IR, of states, of the international and the global and open up to possibilities of thinking anew cosmologically. In so doing, we can, perhaps, ‘let go’ and finally take IR and its co-existence problematiques ‘into the mesh’. In this mesh we see these
International Relations in a Relational Universe. Milja Kurki, Oxford University Press (2020). © Milja Kurki. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198850885.001.0001
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co-existence problems are deeper and more ubiquitous than we had learned to appreciate. We see negotiations with varied animals, plants, bacteria, and geophysical cycles, and relations with and in forests, seas, and atmospheres. Our interconnections, relational, processing, and political challenges, relate even beyond this planet: to intergalactic dust clouds, solar winds, and magnetic fields. The classical cosmological parameters of IR are different. They have been characterized, as Bentley Allan (2018) suggests too, by commitments to the idea of absolute time and space,¹ the idea of temporal and spatial backgrounds within which ‘things’ move; relatedly, the ‘thingification’ of the world, the idea that we have in the world discrete objects which move and ‘inter-act’ against a background; and commitment to varied assumptions around materialism and mechanisms as ways of conceptualizing natural and social processes. Further, many scientists have been committed to the idea of observational knowledge, and to the idea that we may be able to find laws of nature or social life. For some IR theorists, for example, patterns of international politics can be found, controlled and manipulated. This is not all, for perhaps more foundationally, IR has been committed to humanism, and rather uncritically so: it has always seen a special role for humans, initially as observes of God’s laws, then as controllers and shapers of laws of nature,² and ultimately as the keepers of not only ‘politics’ but also as the ‘saviours’ of the planet. Relational cosmology shakes these cosmological assumptions and the edifices they hold up. It shifts, or loosens, our metaphysical legacies a little as we grapple with what we have learned about the world around us. Relational cosmology suggests that as limited, situated knowers in the unfolding of multiple dynamic relations of the universe, we have glimpsed the possibilities for ‘letting go’, of theological structures, of truths, of heavy metaphysics, of God’s eye ethics. And as limited situated beings we can learn to accept that we do not know, perhaps cannot know, the totality of the relational world, and its processes, including ‘human’ processes. Certainly we can never know them ‘from the outside’, completely, definitively. It follows that in the relational universe ‘we’ are not autonomous ‘things’ but rather processes harnessing energy, matter, and information in our various relations and relational becomings. Relational intra-action has taken some complex and interesting forms in our region of the universe, so much so that the sciences—natural and social sciences—have a tough ask as they try, with our limited brains and concepts, to figure out cosmic chemistry, planetary ecosystems, and the challenging ‘human’ worlds. In other parts of the universe, entropy has won; there things are somewhat simpler, it seems, but very little about our surroundings is ‘simple’, certainly for limited, situated knowers such as ourselves. ¹ Only the former was emphasized by Allan. ² This shift between observing laws and controlling via laws is recorded well by Allan (2018).
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On this liquid warm planet, with genes inherited from our many ancestors and shared species mates, ‘we, humans’ guzzle energy as we support our large brains to live, love, and survive. We do so now predominantly in cities and states, although still reliant on plants and animals to feed us, which is why we have restructured the global ecosystem to ‘feed us’. Culture, society, and politics allow for collective learning and memory; crucial for human societies given the inability of biological forms like us to directly photosynthesize. Yet they also give rise to trouble, much trouble, between ‘ourselves’ and the rest of the world around us. Not only do human communities engage in wars and subjugation of some humans to the benefit of others; but they also engage in destructive patterns of consumption and relentless restructuring of relations between humans and non-humans: ‘we’ morph nonhuman life and non-life to serve ‘our’ interests (or the interests of ‘some of us’). In this book, I try to think anew cosmologically. This process is important because our cosmologies are of our relations with humans but also with the world and as such deeply consequential for how we exist, know, conceptualize, do politics, and develop commitments. This is why we should beware of how our cosmologies process us and the world, and us ‘humans’ in the world. I suggest here that if we see a reason to think anew, as I do, as relational cosmologists do, as critical humanists do, as decolonial theorists do, we should then think, process, diffract differently in cosmological frames. Following and extending relational cosmology as a way of thinking ourselves into the cosmos, and IR, anew, in line with Haraway I conceptualize us, and others, as symbionts intra-acting in the mesh, made in relations, processing relations. If we think relationally we are not in relations of things, but exist in ‘open’ porous dynamic relationalities transformed in our collaborations with relationalities, human, non-human, and technological. We are of the planet, the cosmos, symbionts of ecosystems; we are not simply on the planet, governing it. Even as we are learning to live with this—learning from ecology, art, and species mates about our shared troubled condition—we sometimes still come to think we can know from the outside, and that we can control. In IR we even dream that if only we can ‘solve’ our ‘own’ human coordination problems—how to pollute more equally among nations, how to avoid nuclear war—we could learn to ‘manage’ not only humans but also this ‘planet’. As we do so, we call on the long-standing mythological and religious beliefs in our special human faculties, rights, and qualities. And we embed these beliefs in special humanity in our imaginations of politics, of states: they have become the secular keepers of special humans ‘above’ and ‘beyond’ the non-human world within which ‘we’ make decisions on how we relate to ‘the background’ of the environment, of resources. Probing the world through science has continued many of these myths, but it has transformed them into new guises. Science then is not beyond myths. Yet, science, as a way of exposing us to the world, has challenged and stretched our experiences, thinking, and story-telling. Sciences have in the last few hundred years also produced new ways of thinking, observing, being, acting.
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We have learned about galaxies and star formation; the processes of clumping of matter into planets; generation of life through chemistry; history of geophysical and biological change on the planet. We have learned that there may be origin stories much more interesting than those set out in the Bible. And as a result, we can, it seems, also learn to relate, and to re-relate, to the relations we are of. This is why cosmology matters. Cosmological assumptions make us, process us, but how, and who with, we think cosmology also matters. Much is at stake in cosmological debate: not only our role, our status as ‘us’, but also the kind of collaborations, ethical commitments, and political communities we build. Relational cosmology challenges not only how we do physical science but also how we think, practice, and act in a cosmos which is one of relations; how we make communities with critters, with ‘humans’, with extra-planetary processes. We can think ‘away’, we can stretch anew, with what we have probed, felt, experimented, conceptualized. Because cosmology matters, and because it matters for ‘everything’, it also matters for ‘IR’. The legacies of the past weigh heavy on us in IR—IR is carried on the back of the weight of heavy metaphysics linked to God, his special humans and his secular responsibilities imposed on us. Yet, with relational cosmology we can not only appreciate this heavy legacy and our role in processing it but also to ask new questions, to relate anew. We can ask: How do we collaborate, already, beyond human communities? What power structures structure our relations across species? Who might we have to negotiate with in planetary politics to ensure a collective (rather than species solipsistic) survival? Whose politics and what forms of representation do we need to address? This book has sought to contribute to the process of re-relating by giving us some new conceptual tools to think, to re-approximate, to the subject matters related to IR from the point of view of relational cosmology. We see that what emerges is ‘less IR-y IR’: a more open, interdisciplinary horizon of thinking on planetary politics. This is not a paradigm or a metaphysic but a form of ‘light’ reorientation to relations, a way of thinking ‘beyond’ humanist, Newtonian, theologically laced secular IR discourse. In this reorientation we ‘stretch’ our situated knowledges, we relate to our various relations we had learned to ignore, and we create new relations, imaginations, conceptual universes, and also in our new relatings to relations, I hope, new kin.
Worries As you have encountered the ideas here, many worries have no doubt crept into your mind.
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Questions that haunt me include the following. If everything is relations, what do relations tell us? What do we know through them? Why indeed do we call them relations if they are not relations of things? What are relations? And why are relations here in ‘the’ universe, as if we only had one? What does it take to argue for any understanding of ‘the universe’ and is not such a perspective always aspiring for a God’s eye point of view despite the attempts to relate to pluriverses? And is building an alliance with Western scientific cosmology ultimately nothing more than allying with another (colonial) Western set of truth claims to ground (beyond question) our thinking? Further, what has this account really given us? What is a policy recommendation that arises from this? Is there even an IR theory here for us to build on? I do not have full answers to these worries. So I continue to worry about not knowing what relations ‘are’ and am troubled by thinking relations without things. It seems unnatural, unsettling, and worrisome not to know, fix, relations and what they are. But even as I worry, I have also learned to embrace this worry. I can also live with the fact (I think) that for sure I have not ‘captured’ the world through the language of relations. This loosening of concepts then is but a step, a stretch, a re-relating to the world, a diffraction of the world. I also continue to worry over attachment to relations as a notion, and about the fact that there is a Western science basis to the concepts, narratives, and stories set out here. But this is not the same Western Science that struts confidently or is attacked vehemently: it is a science taken off the pedestal and related back into the world. But in its relations with the world it also tells us of things which our stories struggle to understand: it stretches us as the world stretches our conceptual capacities. And it is a universe, but one built on recognition of fundamental multiplicity, situatedness, and limitedness of ‘totalistic’ perspectives—even as we try and reach for the totality, inadequately, in the mesh. And as such, it also creates interesting resonances with Andean cosmology, as well as rethinkings of art and mathematics. It does not stand alone, and it is not a master science; cosmology is, as Smolin argues, only part of relating to the relational world which seems to be taking place not just there but also elsewhere. Even as I worry on such challenges, I worry less—strangely—about the ‘practicality’ of this perspective for IR. What is practical and who gets to judge this, depends on which relations we relate to and which relations we push aside. The relations of IR are, I now think, delimited, disconnected from our real, wider relations, co-existences, vulnerabilities, commitments, exclusions. From a relational perspective, and from relational perspectives at large, arise new ways of being, acting, thinking, and conversing; and yet it doesn’t necessarily travel through and in IR but bends around its gravitational effects, ignoring the heavy mass of the ‘discipline’, its set of truths, its attempt at human mastery over the
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world. And in so doing it also dissolves, a little, the confident ‘IR’, and the ‘human’, and the ‘social’, at least around the margins; revealing the legacies these notions are built on, the power relations they reproduce and the porosities which characterize all seemingly thing-like entities. And yet I do not mean to dismiss the gravity well of IR or the seriousness of the (real world) ‘ir’ challenges that face us on the planet. But I suggest a different orientation to them—a more open, light orientation not weighed down by our cosmological visions of IR and ir. Here, then, are five intentionally ‘light’ and open propositions for academics of IR and practitioners of ir.
Five ‘Light’ Propositions for IR and ir Challenge 1. Let’s ‘Think Big’ As Timothy Morton (2010: 3) argues, ‘one of the things that modern society has damaged, along with ecosystems and species and the global climate, is thinking.’ The inability to think big, think totality, think without a centre, think without limits, think without entities, think without certainty should be challenged. So let’s question the limits and boundaries of our categories and stretch our situated knowledges, both in relation to each other but also in relation to the world(s) around us. Because we are limited, let’s try and avoid the ‘God tricks’ and probe the relations around us—through science, art, and imagination. Let’s not be too humble about the curiosities which we continue to entertain. There is, as Richard Feynman so well put it, a ‘pleasure’ in finding things out. And the more we know, the ‘stranger’ the ‘strange strangers’ we live with in the ‘mesh’ become (Morton 2010). And as we find out ‘more’, we can also feel free to ‘queer’, to ‘twist’, to make familiar things seem a little more difficult, strange, curious. It is not just ‘doing’ that we need—more action—but also more thinking, of a different kind, which also may lead to different senses of doing, acting, feeling, and committing. This can seem hard in the world of IR and ir, in the world of insecurities and state survival imperatives; but loosening our cosmological assumptions we can make space for more thinking and thus, I hope, also for more politically innovative visions for how we negotiate politics in a relational universe.
Challenge 2. Let’s Be Open to Rethinking Relations Let’s think again on our conceptual premises, for our conceptual premises are always troubled. How we think relations is no exception.
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Relational cosmology invites us to re-consider relations. If relations are not relations of things how do we think relations? If we do not have clear entities in relations, how do we think things, humans, social structures? If the ‘environment’ is not a ‘background’ to human action, then how do we think environment and us? If we live in a ‘mesh’ where ‘Nature’ and its ‘animals’, ‘humans’, ‘vegetables’, and ‘minerals’ are not so distinctly separated but processing together, how do we think in the social sciences, the natural sciences, or in IR? If relational cosmology is right we have problems in our IR vocabularies which ‘sit on top of the world’ made by conceptual categories embedded in humanism, object-thinking, and also objectivism. Much more relational thought and relating is possible. Perhaps, relations that matter politically are not only relations of states or individuals but smeared relationalities of the planet? Perhaps we have more than ‘global social relations’ but also ‘planetary negotiations’? And if so, perhaps we need new languages of representation and diplomacy beyond the human, and around the human? If so, how might we develop stretchy vocabularies for IR and ir in such a relational universe? Does planetary politics give us one such opening to explore?
Challenge 3. Let’s Battle Abuses of Science; Let’s Practice Sciences as Democracy Science is much more than application of systematic methods of observation: sciences are about asking questions and holding things open—methodologically and, crucially, conceptually. And science is not what happens in laboratories; it happens across human knowledge construction sites: as Rovelli (2014: 73) puts it: ‘The world is complex and we can capture it in different languages . . . these diverse languages intersect, intertwine and reciprocally enhance each other, like the processes themselves.’ Sciences also are of situated knowers; in them we gather views from processing beings with varied relations to the mesh. Sciences are at a pluralistic stage in enlightenment as Smolin would have it. Let’s then embrace sciences, but in so doing also join the relational revolution which for some decades has tried to battle the abuses of sciences by denying the positivist God tricks and calls of technoscience. Sciences are not politically innocent. And when we do so, we see that a new type of democracy in a relational world, represented in part by scientists, arises against the control on science by the state, by capital and by authoritarian monopolists of knowledge. It is facilitating and propelling this revolution that we should turn to—while cognizant of the perils and dangers of science when made to serve masters of the ‘social world’ for the interests of some humans over many other humans and non-humans. The battle for the ‘soul of science’ is still on (Fuller, 2004).
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And yet, let’s not fear to do science in social science. ‘Social scientists’ when liberated from their fear and reverence of natural science, can develop productive images of science for those physical scientists who still suffer under the weight of their own misconceptions of science. And we can also engage the (natural) sciences in IR. This can fertilize our increasingly stale and reificatory conceptual systems. Let’s think society not on the basis of sciences but in conversation with them. Science will not ‘save’ us; and yet sciences can also re-relate us to our relations, re-represent the world and ourselves, and thus also help in forging a new kind of community, a demos, in a relational universe.
Challenge 4. Let’s Re-relate and Re-commit How we relate to relations, the mesh, matters for how we commit—ethically, politically to those (processing) around (and with) us. Ask then: How do you imagine relations and how does this affect how you act, think and make cuts that matter in the world? Why and how do you justify your ethical commitments to your fellow nationals, to ‘humans’, and with what consequences for specific humans and non-humans? How do you commit to relations with the fish, with forests, with bacteria? We are human and more than human. We are part of relationalities, which call on us to move beyond transcendent moral laws. In this context, let’s focus on fostering and evaluating differential response-abilities to our varied kin, human and non-human. Thus, without universal norms, and perhaps even without ethics, we can still commit deeply, strongly, enthusiastically to ‘others’ in relational processing.
Challenge 5. Let’s Face, Soberly but Boldly, the Challenges We Face Let’s not bury our head in the sand in the face of the oncoming ecological challenges. In the face of multiple catastrophic risks (see Bostrom and Cirkovic, 2008) we may be in need of some sense of panic (Haraway 2016), but let’s also think of the consequences and drives of the different forms of eschatological pronouncement (see e.g. Aradau and van Munster, 2011; Lilley, McNally et al., 2012). There are many powerful forces lining up to (get to) save us; and their justifications seem disturbingly attractive. And at the same time ‘we, humans’, are not necessarily the morally enlightened, nor the planet’s God-given saviours; nor are we really a ‘unified we’ or even distinct, or equal, as a ‘we’. And many of us have a rather grandiose sense of our power and responsibility. As Margulis (1998: 143) reflects: ‘the human
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move to take responsibility for the living Earth is laughable—the rhetoric of the powerless.’ Or in Steven Jay Gould’s (2006: 345) words: ‘we are among millions of species, stewards of nothing.’ And yet, even so, on the planet and in a relational universe, with its history of unfolding, our processings-together, humans too are faced with questions of response-ability, and they are complex. These response-abilities should probably not be left for the states, the international institutions and global governance to handle: for their historical constitution, via cosmological logics of troublesome origins, may hinder rather than help the cause of processing on the planet. Indeed, despite our high opinion of humans, and their i/International r/Relations, humans may not be able to safeguard themselves or the planet within their current cosmological and political visions of themselves or others. And the obsession with ‘saving us’ may be quite unhealthy for ‘us’ and the multiple non-humans we rely on in a relational universe. Yet, insofar as we remain parasites and live in relations, we also share in a wide range of fates and vulnerabilities. It is in this context that we need to work on our understanding of ‘ourselves’ and ‘others’, our relations, our shared porosity, to ‘construct cosmologies of survival’ (Smolin, 1997: 368). Let’s then face the ‘trouble’ in a relational universe, for there is ‘lots of trouble’ but also, simultaneously, ‘lots of kin to be going on with’ (Haraway, 2016: 8).
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Index For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. abstraction and ethics 141–2, 155 and the international 165 stretching knowledge 100–1, 105, 128, 183 aesthetics 55–7, 72 Allan, Bentley 1, 3–4, 17, 24n.1, 130, 133n.4, 164, 192 anthropic principle 53n.6, 66 Anthropocene 8, 170–2, 174, 180 Aristotelian cosmology 26, 43, 76 Ashley, Richard 164 astronomy 8, 30, 37 early studies and development 25–6, 39–41 Bain, William 17, 27, 139, 164 Barad, Karen 12, 119–20, 143–51, 153–4 Barkin, Samuel 185 Bennett, Andrew 103 Biello, David 8 Big Bang 33–4, 54, 57 ekpyrotic model 51 standard model 41–2, 46–9 theory of inflation 47 Booth, Ken 1 Brexit fisheries policy 162–3, 184–8 Brown, Chris 139 Burke, Anthony 2, 9, 154–5, 170–2, 174–6 Chandler, David et al. 172, 174, 176 Chiew, Florence 145–6, 149–51 communitarianism and ethics 141 Connolly, William 167–8 constructivism 11, 90, 114 and international relations 132–3 and situated knowledge 104 Conway, Philip 173–6, 184 Conway, Simon 149 Coole, Diana 11 cosmology definition 14 and politics 1 scientific vs. religious 14–15 social vs. scientific 24–5
throughout history 25–7 whole world 23 see also relational cosmology; scientific cosmology cosmopolitanism 171–2 and ethics 140–1, 154–5 security 154–5, 175 Coward Martin 112, 118 Cox, Brian 109–11 critical theory 35–6, 97, 104, 113–14 Cudworth, Erika 2, 17–18, 125, 127–8, 147 decolonial thought 128–9, 193 democracy 75, 79, 162–3, 171–2, 176, 189 ecological discourse 179–80 and governance 178–9 and knowledge production 92–3, 100–2 and the Parliament of Things 181–2 planetary perspective 173–4, 176–7, 179, 186–7 and relational cosmology 77, 182–4 rise of 177–8 science as 197 Diamond, Jared 124–5 Dirac, Paul 53 Eckersley, Robyn 180, 183 ecology 2, 8–9, 78, 96–7, 133–4, 198 ecological thought 118–20, 122–3 and planetary politics 170, 176, 179–80, 184–6 Einstein, Albert 29–31, 37, 40, 47, 53–5, 62 ekpyrotic model 51 Elias, Norbert 13 Embassy of the North Sea 188 eternal inflation see inflationary multiverse ethics 8–10, 136–7, 157–8 of care 141–2 and communitarianism 141 consciousness and intentionality 148–9 and cosmopolitanism 140–1 global 138, 140, 156, 172 the importance of engagement 151–3 and international relations 137–8, 154–6 and intra-action 144–5
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ethics (cont.) limitations of 137–8, 156–7 as non-necessary 153–4 normative, ‘moral codes’ 138–40 and political commitment 145–8, 152, 154–5, 157–8, 187–8 and poststructuralism, concern for others 142 and relational thinking 139–43 re-relating in the mesh 123 and responsibility 145–8, 152, 154–5, 157–8 and science 77, 80–1 and trans-species connectivity 150–1 Everettian multiverse 49–50 evolutionary universe 51–3, 59 and relational cosmology 56, 59, 65–6, 73 feminism 113–14, 143 and international relations 132, 164 and standpoint epistemology 90–2 Feynman, Richard 97–8, 102–3, 196 Fishel, Stefanie 133–4, 173–4 Foley, Michael 34–5, 45 Friedman, Alfred 40, 47 Frost, Samatha 11 globality 4–5, 20, 161–2 and ethics 138, 140, 156, 172 and the international 132–3, 163–7, 169 see also planetarity Gould, Stephen Jay 198–9 Grove, Jairus 134 Haraway, Donna 1–2, 12, 91, 120–2, 145–6, 166–9, 187–8, 191 Harding, Sandra 90–2 Hobden, Stephen 2, 17–18, 125, 127–8, 147 Hodgson, Peter 87, 123–4 Hossenfelder, Sabine 72 Hubble, Edwin 40, 47 Hutchings, Kimberly 138 inflationary multiverse 49 inflationary universe 47 International Relations (IR) 1, 16, 28, 161 challenges 196–9 criticism 1–2 and ethics 137–8, 154–6 and globality 132–3, 163–7, 169 and Newtonian universe 45 and the problem of co-existence 191–2 and relational cosmology 3–4, 9, 16–18, 131–4 and natural scientific thought 5–7, 110–11
stretching situated knowledge 103–4 see also planetarity intra-action 12, 73–4, 119–20, 119n.3, 122, 148, 190, 192–3 and agential realism 144–5 and ethics 144–7 and planetary democracy 177 Jones, Mark et al. 24 Judeo-Christian cosmology 26–7 Kavalski, Emilian 17–18, 129 knowledge 32, 191 see also situated knowledge Kragh, Helge 29–30, 34, 38, 40–1, 54–5 Latour, Bruno 11–12, 35–6, 115–17, 127–8, 166–9, 181–4, 187 laws of nature 39, 53, 55–6, 59, 61–2, 65–6, 68, 72–3 Leakey, Richard 8–9 Lemaitre, George 40, 47, 57 Lent, Jeremy 25–6 liberalism 7 the international and politics 163–4, 171–2, 177–8 and Newtonian thought 45 and relational thinking 112–13, 131 Linden, Eugene 124–5 Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG) 52–3, 59 and relational cosmology 63–6 Margulis, Lynn 134–5, 198–9 Marx, Marxism 11, 90, 92, 113–14 and the international 164 relational thinking 113–14, 114n.2, 132 maths 37–8 Newtonian cosmology 61–2 and relational cosmology 71–3, 83 and string theories 50–1 Maudlin, Tim 61–2 Microwave Background Radiation (CMB) 47, 51 Mignolo, Walter 130–1 Mitchell, Audra 14, 136, 155, 164–5 MOND (Modified Newtonian Dynamics) 53 Morton, Timothy 118–20, 122–3, 167, 177, 196 M-theory 50–1 multiverse 30, 50, 55, 62, 65–6 inflationary 49 quantum 49–50 and relationality 128–31 natural philosophy 58, 67–8, 84, 118 new materialism 11–13, 117, 157–8
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Newton, Newtonianism 11, 27, 42–3, 78, 112 influence on politics and IR 3–4, 7, 34–5, 45–6 laws of motion 43–5 MOND (Modified Newtonian Dynamics) 53 vs. relationality 61–3, 65, 69, 106–7 and religious belief 27, 39, 44, 47–9 non-human / human relations 6, 108, 111, 116, 124–6, 135, 198 and ethics 140–1, 146, 150–2 and planet politics 171, 173–4, 179–80, 182, 184, 186, 189 Patomäki, Heikki 17–18, 34, 59 Peltonen, Hannes 172 planetarity 162 and democracy 176–84 limits 175–6 notion of planetary 167–9 and politics 174–5 potential 173–4 re-relating 184–9 political discourse 1, 34–5 Newtonian assumptions 45 planetary 174–5 and relational cosmology 3, 8, 24, 173–7, 182–4 and standpoint epistemology 91–3 see also democracy positivism and postpositivism 187, 197 and international relations 16, 104–5, 132–3 knowledge construction 5, 87–91, 94, 102–3, 129 posthumanism 12, 17–18, 75, 172 and ethics 149 and relational thinking 107–8, 115–17, 125 poststructuralism 90, 104 and ethics 142 and relational thinking 114n.2, 132 Qin, Yaqing 17–18, 131 quantum theory 6, 12, 40, 42, 46, 48–50, 62 and social sciences 143–4 see also Loop Quantum Gravity realism 11–12, 32, 128 and abstraction 100–1 agential, and ethics 144 critical, thing-like language 114–15, 117 and International Relations 45, 103–4, 131, 163, 172 scientific 24–5, 31–3, 35–6, 74, 102 Rees, Martin 110
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relational cosmology 9–10, 58–60, 80–1, 83–4, 192–4 core principles 62–3 emergence and novelty 126–8 and evolution of the universe 56, 59, 65–6, 73 and international relations 3–4, 9, 16–18, 131–4 and Loop Quantum Gravity 63–5 philosophical principles 67–74 and the pluriverse 128–31 and political discourse 3, 8, 24, 173–7, 182–4 and reorientation of physics 56 scientific and social challenges 33–6 and social sciences 75–80 and the whole world cosmology 60–2 relations, relationality 16–17, 65, 106–9, 134–5 intra-action 119–20, 144–5 non-human 124–6, 150–1 porousness and symbiosis 120–2, 127 relational thinking 68–9, 112 reorientation 118 and scientific cosmology 109–11 ‘thing-language’ 114–15, 117–18, 122, 133 see also ethics; re-relating relativity theory 40, 45, 48, 54 and quantum theory 64, 69 and relational cosmology 59, 72, 76 religious belief 24, 74, 110, 164 and ethics 139 and globality 166 and Newton’s cosmology 27, 39, 44, 47–9 and relational thinking 79–80 vs. scientific cosmology 14–15, 26–7, 39 re-relating 18, 80, 183, 194 evolution, and novelty 71 in the mesh 111–12, 122–3, 133 to politics 184–90 Rosenberg, Justin 9–10, 191 Rovelli, Carlo 33, 43–4, 48, 51–2, 59, 63–6, 87, 104–6, 120, 157, 191, 197 Rudolf, Terry 97 Sagan, Dorian 8, 106, 109–10, 124–5, 149 Schmidt, Jessica 157–8 Schneider, Joseph 91, 187 science 8, 193–4 as democracy 197–8 and politics 181–4, 186–7 scientific realism 24–5, 31–3, 35–6, 74, 102 Western, critical reading of 130, 195 scientific cosmology 24, 29–31, 37, 41, 46 Big Bang and the inflationary universe 42, 46–9 changing laws model 53–4
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 13/1/2020, SPi
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scientific cosmology (cont.) crisis of physics 37–8, 54–6 ekpyrotic model 51 emergence of 38–41 evolutionary universe 51–3 multiverse models 49–50 Newtonian 42–5 and relationality 109–11 and religious belief 14–15, 26–7, 39 string theory 50–1 self-regulation 121 Silk, Joseph 54–5 Singer, Peter 179–80 situated knowledge 87–8, 104–5 historical understanding 70–1 positivists and postpositivism 5, 87–91, 94, 102–3, 129 and standpoint epistemology 90–5 stretching 99–105, 128, 183 Smolin, Lee 6, 23, 35–7, 51–3, 56, 58–63, 65–71, 102, 106, 116–17, 126, 136, 187 social sciences 28–9, 34 as “all-too-social” 10–13 engaging other sciences 198 and knowledge 70–1, 88–94, 98, 101–2, 105 and quantum theory 143–4 and relational cosmology 75–80 complex open systems 77–80 societal relations 75–7 and relational thinking 112, 116, 125–6, 135 thinking anew in 4–5, 7 space and time 3 and relationality 64–5, 76, 83, 100–1, 120, 192
scientific cosmologies 43–5, 48–50, 52, 61 and scientific realism 33 standpoint epistemology 87–8, 94–5, 105 and democratization of knowledge 101 limitations 92–9 and situated knowledge 90–2 stretching knowledge and relations 94–5, 99–100 Stengers, Isabelle 12 string theory 50–1, 55, 62, 64, 74 substantialism 5, 17–18, 123, 128, 131–3 Sylvest, Casper 166 ‘thing-language,’ and relationality 114–15, 117–18, 122, 133 Toulmin, Stephen 23–5, 33–4, 36 Truss, Elisabeth 185 Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt 130, 165–6, 174 Unger, Roberto Mangabeira 23, 37, 52, 58, 61, 63, 67–8, 71, 73, 75–6 Van Munster, Rens 166 Walker, R.J.B. 164 Wendt, Alex 5–6, 12, 25 Wertheim, Margaret 45 Whitehead, Alfred North 12–13, 39 whole world cosmology 60–2 Wolfe, Cary 150 Zanotti, Laura 137, 152–4, 156 Zehfuss, Maja 156–7